Welcome to the Workshop

Hi everyone, I'm Justine — photographer, 25 years experience, and I've been shooting for the RCN for a long time.

I’m here today to help you get the best out of your brand new Canon R7.

Before we get started — let's go around the room. Tell me your name and how you'd describe your experience with cameras. Complete beginner? Used one a bit? Pretty confident? No wrong answers.

What we’re covering today:

  • How a camera works and what the exposure triangle is

  • Getting to know your Canon R7

  • Four scenarios hands on — portrait, group shot, still life and events

  • Cheat sheets for each scenario to take away

Let's get started.

The one key difference

Your eye adjusts automatically — your pupil gets bigger in low light, smaller in bright light, without you thinking about it.

A camera can't do that on its own. You have to tell it how much light to let in — and that's where the exposure triangle comes in, which is what we're going to look at next.

How a Camera Works

A camera is modelled on the human eye. It's actually a really useful way to understand it.

Here's how your eye works:

  • Light from the sun hits an object and reflects into your eye

  • It passes through your lens and lands on your retina at the back of the eye

  • Your retina converts that light into signals your brain reads as an image

A camera works on exactly the same principle:

  • Light reflects off your subject and enters the camera through the lens

  • It passes through the lens and lands on the sensor — the camera's equivalent of the retina

  • The sensor converts that light into a digital image

The Exposure Triangle

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The Exposure Triangle *

There are three things on your camera that control how much light hits the sensor. Change any one of them and your image gets brighter or darker. They are:

  • Aperture — the size of the opening in the lens. Bigger opening = more light in

  • Shutter speed — how long the sensor is exposed to light. Longer = more light in

  • ISO — how sensitive the sensor is to the light it receives. Higher = brighter image

Together these three things are called the exposure triangle. They work together — change one and it affects the others.

Why does this matter?

Getting the right exposure means balancing all three. Too much light and your image is washed out — overexposed. Too little and it's dark — underexposed.

The good news is you don't need to master all three today. For most of what you'll be doing with the R7 we'll be using Aperture Priority mode — which means you set the aperture and the camera handles the rest automatically.

We'll come back to exactly what that means when we look at each scenario.