Read The Manual

I was shooting a friend’s birthday party this week and couldn’t figure out why the exposure lock button wouldn’t work on my new Canon 7D. The exposure lock ‘*’ button is really handy when using ETTL flash to avoid the metering system getting tricked. This can happen when the part of the frame you want to focus on is too dark or light. If the focus point is too dark, the flash will output more power than needed. If too light, the flash will not output enough light.

I’ve been using Canon bodies for years and the trusty ‘*’ button on the back of the camera body always works. After wading through the custom menu functions, I still couldn’t figure out what was going on. So I hacked my way through the evening using manual exposure compensation.

I pulled out the unopened manual from my Canon 7D box after returning home and discovered that this new body has a new ‘M-Fn’ (multi funtion) button next to the shutter button which takes care of the exposure lock. Who would have known that the button I was looking for all night was literally a few millimetres from my trigger finger!

So the moral of the story is - read through your camera manual. You never know what you might discover about your new gear. And you might just save yourself a few headaches.

Read The Manual