From the course: Canon 5D Mark IV: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Using Live View - 5D Tutorial

From the course: Canon 5D Mark IV: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Start my 1-month free trial

Using Live View

- In many cases, I like to use the live view display to set up my shot, maybe to establish overall composition, to check to make sure that I'm in focus for my setup. Even to get a preview, a little sense of what the overall exposure looks like. I have, in this case, set up a little bit of a still life for example, a little subject I'd like to photograph, and I think live view will make it a little bit easier, especially as you'll see in a moment thanks to a new feature in the Canon 5D Mark IV. I'll go ahead and press the start/stop button in order to enable that live view shooting mode, and so now I can see the view through the lens on my LCD display in real time. I also can see, of course, my overall exposure settings, so if I wanted to change my lens aperture, for example, I can see an indication of that change. But again, keep in mind, I have a touchscreen for this LCD on the 5D Mark IV, and so I can tap any of those exposure controls to bring up an additional adjustment control so that I can change, in this case my overall exposure compensation, for this subject I think about a half stop minus exposure compensation will work out well. I'll go ahead and go back to my primary display there for live view. I can also, of course, establish focus. Now in many cases, with a still-life subject like this I might use manual focus, so that I'm adjusting the overall focus, maybe zooming in on my live view display to evaluate that focus, but if I prefer to make use of autofocus, that touchscreen, once again, comes in handy. If I tap on an area of the screen, the camera will focus in that area, so here focusing on that rear wheel, for example, of the cannon, or I can tap right on the front of the cannon to set that as my focus point, and the camera will automatically focus there for me. Just keep in that mind that if you've disabled autofocus for the shutter release button that's also going to disable the autofocus when you tap on that LCD display. There's even an option to enable touch shutter, so I can just tap in order to trigger the exposure, so now when I tap on the screen, not only are we focusing in that area, we're also capturing an image at the same time. For me, personally, that would usually mean that I'm capturing too many images because I'm tapping around trying to make sure that I'm setting focus in the right spot, I don't want to capture an image every single time that I tap, so I've disabled that feature in this case, but I do find that tapping to set my focus point can be very helpful. So using that live view, just as has been available for a variety of cameras previous to the Mark IV, the overall functionality is essentially the same, but now with that touchscreen capability we have a few more options that make it more convenient than ever to use live view for capturing our photos.

Contents