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Switching Your Canon EOS Rebel T7i/800D to Live View Mode

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2017-11-13 1:21:40
Canon EOS Rebel T4i/650D For Dummies
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Like most dSLRs sold today, your Canon EOS Rebel T7i/800D camera offers Live View, which disables the viewfinder and instead displays a live preview of your subject on the camera monitor. The following list explains the basics of using Live View:

rebel-live

  • Switching to Live View for photography: Press the Live View button to shift from viewfinder shooting to Live View mode. You hear a clicking noise and then the viewfinder goes dark and the monitor displays the live scene. By default, some shooting data appears as well, with the amount and type of information varying depending on your exposure mode and a few other settings. The figure shows the display as it appears in the Auto exposure mode when the default picture-taking settings are used for that mode.
rebel-preview

The Live View button requires a firm push to turn the feature on and off. If nothing happens after one or two button presses, you may need to reset the Live View Shoot menu option to Enable. This is the default setting, but it's possible you or another user changed the setting to Disable at some point. Where you find the Live View Shoot option depends on your exposure mode; in the advanced modes (P, Tv, Av, and M), go to Shooting Menu 5, as shown on the left here. In other exposure modes, the option lives on Shooting Menu 1, as shown on the right.

rebel-enable To use Live View, make sure this menu option is set to Enable.

Why would Canon give you the option to disable Live View functionality? Because it's easy to accidentally press the Live View button and switch to that mode when you don't really want to go there.

  • Engaging Live View for movie recording: For movie-recording, simply moving the On/Off switch to the Movie mode setting (represented by the movie-camera symbol) engages Live View. You can't use the viewfinder in Movie mode, so the setting of the Live View Shoot menu option has no impact.

    In Movie mode, pressing the Live View button starts and stops recording. To exit Movie mode, move the On/Off switch to On if you want to begin shooting stills or to Off if you're done shooting.

In many ways, shooting photos in Live View mode is the same as for viewfinder photography, but some important aspects, such as autofocusing, work very differently.

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

About the book author:

Julie Adair King is a veteran digital photography educator. Her best selling books include Digital Photography For Dummies and thirty titles on Canon and Nikon cameras.