Starving Artistry

How to Wirelessly Trigger Your Flash with your Canon 7D

// January 5th, 2011 // 9 Comments » // Instructables, Photo

Well, I told Troy I’d show him how to get his 7D to activate his flash without any extra special equipment, but then thought it would make a good blog post. So here is an instructable: How to wirelessly trigger your flash with your Canon 7D.

You see, the 7D is a very cool camera because it comes with the ability to trigger Canon speedlite flashes remotely. Most cameras require an external attachment to send a radio signal to the flashes, but not the 7D. So long as you are within sight of your flash, the 7D will send an infra red signal to the flash telling it to fire.

Okay, first things first. Let’s tell the Canon7D to send that signal.

1: Press the Menu Button

2: Scroll to “Built In Flash func.” followed by “Flash Control” and hit “Set”

3: Scroll Down to Wireless Function and hit “Set”

4: Select the middle option (external flash alone) and press “Set”

5: Go to your flash and HOLD the Zoom button until the screen shows this

6: Cycle through until you have the camera on “Slave” then press “Set”

7: With your camera powered on, press this button to pop up the flash

Now You’re Ready to Rock!

The camera and flash default to ETTL mode, which is essentially “Auto Flash.” It detects the ambient light around, and adjusts the flash’s power to fire accordingly. This is by far the easiest way to use your flash and a good place to start. But, if you want more control over it, it’s time to move over to manual mode. With the wireless function in the 7D, you can make all the adjustments from the camera itself which is a huge time saver.

Back in the Menu -> Flash settings, select the first option

Select MANUAL

Now you can manually set the output of the flash

1/64 Power

1/1 Power

Well there ya have it. If you have more than one ETTL enabled flash, you can control up to three groups (I believe) from the camera itself. There are limitations to this system (such as if you place the flash around a corner or wall into a different room) but in general it’s very handy. Play around with the menu settings and you’ll see how separate flashes can be grouped to different channels to be controlled separately from each other. Good luck, and send me a link to see your new off-camera flash shots!

My OLD digital picture workflow

// January 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Instructables, Photo

I woke up with my hair like this today. What do you think? Tay says it’s a natural Faux Hawk. All the look, none of the effort! My brother in law says it looks like anime hair. Really, it’s just a result of bed head. ^_^

My awesome self-pic

So as I take more and more photos, my computer is becoming more and more cluttered with the photos. I don’t really ever want to delete any photos because… you know, WHAT IF I want to go back and re-edit one? Anyway, I am restructuring the way I store and edit my photos, but for most of you out there that are just getting into lightroom and/or photo documenting your life, this is how I used to do it.

The beauty of lightroom (link) is that it never touches your original files. You load the photos into the program, make your edits, create as many different versions of the same photo that you want, then you can export all the edits to create new photos which are ready to be uploaded wherever you want them to go.

Here is my process when I load my photos into my computer for editing, then uploading:

My Monitor has a CF Card Reader

So I put in my memory card, and open up my computer so I can create a new folder. I always use the current date, rather than the date the photos were taken. I then go find the pictures on the memory card and drag them over.

Create a New Folder — Name it the Current Date

Then I open up lightroom and drag the files into lightroom. A screen pops up asking if I want to import them, to which I, of course, say yes.

Import the Photos into Lightroom

Remember, lightroom doesn’t actually move any of your photos, so right now all you’re doing is telling lightroom where to access the photos so you can manipulate them. Once I’m done editing, I will highlight the photos (the keepers) I want to export, and then right click, then go to “export.”

Export to bring up the next dialog box

A new box will open up with a bunch of options. The biggest concern is WHERE it’s exporting to, which you can set up there at the top. I always put new exports in a sub-folder, which you can create each time you export. You can see here with these photos from my NYE lunch, that’s what I called my subfolder.

Name the Subfolder something relevant to the picture set!

I export the files twice. I export once at full size (each photo is like, 7 – 10 megabytes) and once re-sized for emailing and uploading to facebook and flickr.

Re-Name the set with the moniker “small” and Resize!

I find that 1024 on the long edge is usually small enough for every day emailing and viewing without sacrificing too much of the image size. The only reason you’ll ever need those bigger photos is for printing out the photos into physical medium larger than a 4×6 photo.

Now that I have these photos, it’s time to upload them to your favorite file sharing service! Most people use facebook, as do I, but they always make the photos look like crap. So for embedding on my blog, I use flickr (link).

Once they’re uploaded to flickr, I grab the embed code that they so handily give to you and then copy and paste it into my blog. It’s really cool, you can select what size you want it, and the code they give you automatically makes it a link back to your flickr account, which is perfectly fine with me. That’s what I don’t use my blog uploader, and I actually find that the flickr servers are faster anyway.

Copy and Paste into your favorite blog service!

anyway, that’s how I get my photos from camera to blog. Once I get my new gear in, I’ll show you my new workflow. Here are the pics from my NYE lunch with Jimmy, Beppe, Roger, and Liz (sorry, no pics of Bep’s boy toy).

Liz

Roger

Jimmy

Beppe

PS — All the other photos in the post were uploaded to flickr using the handy iphone app!