Canon 7D

I had problems with the focus for this image. We have a black 1½ years old dog, running at “full speed” toward me. His name is “Flash”. Almost all the photos are out of focus. Here is a sample at 1:1.

Saturday was a very foggy day on Canada's West Coast. I still went to hand feed the sandhill cranes and see if there is any way to improve my BIF skills. There is BIF, Bird In Flight, there is BOG, Bird On the Ground, there is BIT, Bird In Tree… Very few people make photos of BIF, most people talk BIF but they don't do BIF, they do BOG or BIT. I'm mostly a BOG/BIT guy, but that's OK since I do not claim to do BIF. So I decided this year to make thousands upon thousands of BIF and eventually they will be good. So I started with one of the most difficult subject for BIF, the ducks! They are fairly small and they are extremely quick. Easy to find but very hard to photograph in flight.

Please note the underexposure from the Canon 7D quirk.

Canon, like all other camera manufacturers, has a flash mode to balance the flash with the ambient light, aka the fill-in flash. You need to have the flash in eTTL and the camera in Av mode. When using the flash, the aperture controls the power of the flash and the shutter speed controls the ambient light.

The Canon 7D is already a 3 years old camera, so Canon gave it 2 Digic-4 CPUs, once of which is dedicated to the auto-focusing. Still at 8 frames per second, the Digic-4 has its limits. It's a battle of sharing the CPU cycles between the processing of the photos and the auto-focusing. So Canon decided to let you decide how should the camera prioritize the speed of capturing the photos vs the auto-focusing. This is controlled by the C.Fn III - 2 for the configuration menu > Autofocus/Drive.

On the various Canon Forums, some people are complaining about the Micro-Focus-Adjustment (MFA) and the new firmware v2.0. Many people have reported that their MFA has changed from +something to 0. How could that be?

1. The camera has a database of most Canon lenses in each dSLR camera. The data is mostly used for illumination correction to make sure that the illumination is the same across the whole photo.
2. The Canon 7D is old enough that Canon has accumulated enough data over the last 2½ years to know most of the MFA for most of the Canon lenses. This data is included in the new firmware. That's one of the reasons that you should redo your MFA for all of your lenses.
3. The MFA changes all the time! The Micro-Focus-Adjustment is to compensate for the physical variations of the lens/camera combination against the theoretical manufacturing. The problem is that both the camera and the lenses contract and expand depending on the temperature variations. I mentioned it before at: Micro Focus Adjustment Revisited