01Start Here

Chloe

You told me this was the biggest big-girl purchase you've ever made. That deserves more than a folded leaflet in the box, so I made you this.

It's two things at once, deliberately. It's a guide to your camera, the Canon G7 X Mark III, every dial and button, checked against Canon's own 327-page manual so nothing in here is guesswork. And it's a guide to photography, the actual craft, the part that stays true whatever camera you're holding in twenty years. You said you're still working out what all the settings mean. That's the bit most people never get past, and it's the bit that's genuinely worth learning.

You've got California, Canada and camp coming. That's an extraordinary run of things to point a camera at, and it's why I've written the recipes for those specific trips rather than for nothing in particular.

The camera itself is a good buy. The 1-inch sensor and that bright f/1.8 lens will beat your phone comfortably once the light gets difficult, which is exactly when the photos you actually care about happen, sunsets, campfires, evenings, indoors. It's also a camera that hides most of its talent behind settings nobody bothers to explain.

So let's explain them. Not all at once, and not in the order Canon does it.

Any question this doesn't answer, ask the box at the top. You can send it a photo too. It reads the settings your camera recorded, so it can tell you whether that blur was your hands or your focus, and what to do differently standing in the same spot.

Or ask me.

Grandad

How to use this guide:

• If you have ten minutes right now, do The Ten-Minute Setup below. It matters more than anything else here.
• If you are about to go somewhere, jump to The Recipes and find your situation. Each one gives you the exact dial positions.
• If something is going wrong, go to Troubleshooting.
• If you have a question this guide doesn't answer, use the Ask box. It knows this whole guide plus Canon's full 327-page manual.
• The Cheat Card at the end is designed to be screenshotted. Put it in your phone's favourites before you fly.

You do not need to read this in order. You do not need to read all of it.

The Ten-Minute Setup

Do this once, at home, before any trip. It fixes the things that quietly ruin photos later.

1. Set the date, time and time zone properly. MENU → the wrench/settings tab → Date/Time/Zone.

This is not admin. Three real reasons it matters:

• Your photos are stamped with it, which is how you'll ever find "that night in San Francisco" again.
• The camera uses it for temperature control when recording video. Canon says so explicitly: without the date/time/zone set, overheating warnings can't display correctly.
• Change the time zone when you land. Otherwise your California photos are filed under UK time and everything sorts wrongly.

2. Format the memory card in the camera. MENU → settings tab → Format card.

Format in the camera, never on a computer. Do this with every new card, and once before each big trip. It wipes everything, so copy your photos off first.

3. Set image quality to RAW + JPEG. MENU → shooting tab → Image quality → choose the RAW option alongside the large/fine JPEG.

• JPEG is the finished photo. Ready to post, small file.
• RAW is everything the sensor saw, unprocessed. Much bigger file, looks flat and dull straight out of camera, but holds enormous amounts of recoverable detail in shadows and skies.

Shoot both. The JPEG is what you post from your phone that evening. The RAW is your insurance, when you accidentally underexpose a once-in-a-lifetime shot, RAW is what saves it. You cannot go back later and wish you'd shot RAW.

If your card fills up faster than you like, that's what the spare card is for. Storage is cheap. Moments are not.

4. Turn on the grid. MENU → shooting tab → Shooting info display → Grid display → 3x3.

It makes horizons straight and compositions better, instantly, for free.

5. Set image review to Off, or 2 seconds. MENU → shooting tab → Image review.

The default holds the photo on screen after every shot, which makes you miss the next one. Turn it off and check shots when you want to, by pressing the playback button.

6. Charge the battery fully, and buy two spares. More on this in Power and Cards, but the short version: one battery is not enough for a day out. It is not close to enough.

7. Put a wrist strap on it. It came with one. Use it. The camera is small, smooth and expensive, and you will be photographing over railings, off boats and from viewpoints.

Holding It Properly

Most blurry photos are not a camera fault. They are a holding fault.

• Right hand grips the body, index finger resting on the shutter button.
• Left hand supports the camera from underneath, not gripping the sides.
• Elbows tucked in against your ribs. This is the big one: it turns your arms into a tripod instead of two springs.
• Breathe out, then squeeze. Don't stab the shutter button. Squeeze it gently.
• Press halfway first, wait for the focus confirmation, then press the rest of the way.

If light is low, brace against something. A wall, a railing, a tree, a table. Anything solid beats free-standing hands every time.

The Half-Press

This is the single most important physical habit with this camera, so it gets its own section.

The shutter button has two stages:

1. Half-press: the camera focuses and meters the light. You'll see a green box (or boxes) appear and hear a confirmation beep.
2. Full press: it takes the photo.

Most beginner shots are ruined by jabbing straight through both stages, which fires the shutter before focus has settled.

The half-press also gives you a superpower called focus and recompose:

1. Point the centre of the frame at your subject.
2. Half-press and hold: focus locks.
3. Keeping it held, move the camera to frame the shot how you actually want it.
4. Press the rest of the way.

This is how you put a person off to one side of the frame and still have them sharp.

02Your Camera, Part by Part

Everything below is from Canon's official diagrams for the G7 X Mark III. Read it once with the camera in your hand, pressing each thing as you go. Ten minutes here saves you hours of menu-hunting later.

The Top and Front

1 Flash (stays down until you slide its lever) · 2 Stereo microphone · 3 Power · 4 Shutter button, with the zoom lever wrapped round it · 5 Mode dial · 6 Exposure compensation dial, stacked underneath the mode dial · 7 Control ring, around the lens

Shutter button: two stages, half-press to focus, full press to shoot. Covered in Start Here, and it's the habit that matters most.

Zoom lever: the collar wrapped around the shutter button. Push it one way for wide, the other for zoomed in. In playback it does something different: one way shows you a grid of thumbnails, the other magnifies the photo so you can check whether the eyes are actually sharp. Use it for that constantly.

Mode dial: the big dial with P, Tv, Av, M and the rest. This is the one that decides how much of the camera's brain you're borrowing. Full explanation in The Mode Dial.

Exposure compensation dial: the dial stacked underneath the mode dial, marked -3 to +3. This is the most useful dial on the camera and almost nobody uses it. It gets its own section, because it fixes more bad photos than everything else combined.

One position on it is marked differently: the Dial/Ring Assign position. Park the dial there and you can reprogram what the control ring and rear dial do in each mode. Ignore this until you've been shooting a few months, then it becomes genuinely useful.

Control ring: the ring around the lens. What it does depends on your mode:

• Av mode: sets your aperture
• Tv mode: sets your shutter speed
• M mode: sets your aperture (the rear dial sets shutter speed)

It's the nicest control on the camera. Smooth, precise, right where your left hand already is.

Power button: obvious, but note it takes a moment to wake. If you're waiting for a moment, leave it on rather than switching off between shots.

Flash, and the flash-up lever: the flash is hidden until you slide the little lever to pop it up. It will not fire while it's down. This is good news, because the built-in flash is the least attractive light source you own and you should mostly leave it closed. Where it is useful: outdoors in harsh midday sun, to fill in the shadow under someone's eyes and nose. Counter-intuitive, genuinely works.

Microphone (stereo): built into the top. Keep your fingers off it while filming. Canon's manual specifically warns that covering it muffles the audio, and it's an easy mistake because it sits right where your hand wants to go.

External microphone IN: a 3.5mm socket. This is a big deal and the main reason this camera became the vlogging camera. If you ever get serious about video, a small plug-in mic transforms it, because bad audio ruins good video far faster than bad footage does.

Lamp: the small light on the front. It helps the camera focus in the dark, and blinks for the self-timer.

Tripod socket and memory card / battery cover: both underneath.

The Back

1 Screen (tilts up 180°, down 45°) · 2 Movie button · 3 Wi-Fi · 4 AE lock · 5 Control dial · 6 Q, your shortcut to everything · 7 Up: drive mode · 8 Right: flash · 9 Down: INFO · 10 Left: macro and manual focus · 11 MENU · 12 Playback

Screen: tilts up about 180° so it faces forward, and down about 45°. The 180° flip is for filming or photographing yourself, and it's why this camera is everywhere on TikTok. The 45° downward tilt is the underrated one: it lets you hold the camera above a crowd and still see what you're framing.

Canon's warning, worth respecting: don't force it further than it goes, and close it when the camera's in your bag.

Control dial: the wheel on the back. Turns to change values, and the four edges press like buttons.

Q (Quick Control) button: in the centre of that wheel. This is your shortcut to almost everything. Press it and you get a menu of the settings that actually matter, ISO, white balance, drive mode, image quality, ND filter, without digging through the full menu system. If you learn one button beyond the shutter, learn this one.

The four directional buttons around the dial:

• Up: drive mode (single shot, burst, self-timer)
• Down: INFO, cycles what's shown on screen. Press it until you see the histogram and the settings, not just a clean picture.
• Left: macro / manual focus
• Right: flash settings

Movie button: the red-dot button. Starts recording from any mode. You do not have to be on the Movie position of the dial. Handy, and also easy to hit by accident, so if you find mystery clips on your card, that's why.

AE lock button (the ⁕): locks the exposure. Useful when you're photographing someone against a bright sky and want the camera to expose for their face and then stay put while you recompose.

Wi-Fi button: connects to your phone. See Getting Photos Onto Your Phone.

MENU: the full settings system. You'll live in the Q menu far more than here.

Playback button: reviews your photos.

DIGITAL terminal (USB-C) and HDMI: under the flap on the side. The USB-C charges the camera and moves files. More in Power and Cards.

Indicator light: small light near the buttons. Steady orange while USB charging, blinking orange means a charging error, which is your cue to check the cable or the adapter.

The Screen Is a Touchscreen

Easy to forget, because it also has all these buttons. But you can:

• Tap to focus on something: tap a face, tap a flower, the camera focuses there. Fastest way to control focus there is.
• Swipe through photos in playback, pinch to zoom.
• Tap through the Q menu instead of using buttons.

Tap-to-focus is the one to build into your habits. It's faster than any button.

What The Numbers On Your Camera Mean

Worth knowing what you actually bought, because these numbers explain what it can and can't do:

• 20.1 megapixels, 1-inch stacked sensor. The sensor size matters far more than the megapixels. A 1-inch sensor is roughly four times the area of a typical phone sensor. Bigger sensor, more light gathered, cleaner photos when it's dark.
• 24 to 100mm equivalent lens, f/1.8 to 2.8. 24mm is properly wide (landscapes, tight rooms), 100mm gets you meaningfully closer. f/1.8 at the wide end is a genuinely bright lens, and that is what buys you handheld shots at a campfire.
• ISO 125 to 12800, expandable to 25600.
• Built-in 3-stop ND filter: a sunglasses lens the camera slides in front of the sensor. Explained in the sunset and waterfall recipes, where it's the secret ingredient.
• 4K video at 30fps, Full HD up to 120fps for slow motion.
• 9 aperture blades: why out-of-focus lights turn into pleasant round circles rather than ugly polygons.

What it doesn't have, so you're not caught out:

• No viewfinder. You compose on the screen. In bright California sun that screen can be hard to see, shade it with your hand.
• No weather sealing. It is not rain-proof or sand-proof. Take this seriously at the beach.
• No hot shoe, so no external flash.
• Its autofocus is good but not the fastest in the world at tracking fast, erratic movement. There are workarounds in the action recipe.

03How Photography Actually Works

This section isn't about your Canon. It's about photography. Everything here would be just as true on a Nikon, a film camera from 1974, or whatever you own in fifteen years. Learn this once and you never learn it again.

It Is All About Light

A camera is a light-collecting bucket.

That's the whole thing. You are collecting a quantity of light onto a sensor, and you have exactly three ways to control how much you collect. Get too little and the photo is dark and murky. Get too much and it's blown out and white. Get it right and you have a photograph.

The three controls are aperture, shutter speed and ISO. People call them the exposure triangle, because changing one means compensating with another.

Here's the part that actually matters, and the part beginners' guides bury: each of the three has a side effect, and the side effects are the creative controls. You're not just choosing brightness. You're choosing what the photo looks like.

Aperture, the hole in the lens

The aperture is an adjustable hole. Wide open lets in lots of light. Stopped down lets in little.

It's measured in f-numbers, and they are backwards, which trips everyone up:

• f/1.8 = a big hole = lots of light
• f/8 = a small hole = little light

Just memorise: small number, big hole. Your lens goes from f/1.8 (wide end) to f/2.8 (zoomed in), which is bright for a compact camera.

The side effect, and it's the good one: depth of field.

Depth of field means how much of the photo is in focus front-to-back.

• Wide open (f/1.8): shallow depth of field. Your friend is sharp, the background melts into soft blur. This is the look people buy cameras for. It says this person is the subject by physically removing everything else.
• Stopped down (f/8): deep depth of field. Everything from the flowers at your feet to the mountains behind is sharp. This is what you want for landscapes, where the whole scene is the subject.

So: aperture is how you control what the viewer looks at. Blur the background and you've made a decision for them.

Two other things that increase background blur, which matter enormously on a small camera like yours:

1. Zoom in. Blur is much easier at 100mm than at 24mm. If you want that creamy background, zoom in rather than walking closer.
2. Get your subject far from the background. Someone standing against a wall will never blur. Move them ten feet forward and the background goes soft immediately.

That second one is free and it's the biggest lever you have. Use it constantly.

Shutter Speed, how long the door is open

The shutter opens, light floods in, the shutter closes. Shutter speed is how long that takes, in fractions of a second.

• 1/1000: extremely brief
• 1/125: normal daylight
• 1/30: getting slow
• 1 second, 15 seconds: long exposures, tripod territory

The side effect: motion.

• Fast shutter (1/500 and up) freezes things. Someone jumping, water mid-splash, a bird.
• Slow shutter (1/15 and down) blurs anything that moves. Waterfalls turn silky, car headlights become light trails, people become ghosts.

Both are correct. It depends entirely on whether you want the moment frozen or the movement felt.

The rule that saves your photos: if the shutter is slower than roughly 1/60, handheld shots start going blurry from your own hands shaking. Not the subject moving, you moving.

So when you see the shutter speed drop below 1/60, you have four choices: open the aperture wider, raise the ISO, brace the camera against something solid, or accept the blur as a creative choice.

There's a classic guideline, worth knowing because it explains why zooming in makes things worse: keep your shutter speed at least 1 over your focal length. At 24mm you can hold 1/25. Zoomed to 100mm you need 1/100 or faster, because zooming magnifies your shake as well as the subject.

ISO, how hard the sensor listens

ISO is how sensitive the sensor is to light. Turn it up and you can shoot in the dark.

• ISO 125: your camera's cleanest setting, bright daylight
• ISO 400 to 800: indoors, overcast
• ISO 1600 to 3200: dim rooms, evenings
• ISO 6400+: properly dark

The side effect: noise. High ISO photos get grainy and lose fine detail and colour depth.

Every camera has a point where noise becomes ugly. On your 1-inch sensor, you'll be very happy up to about ISO 800, comfortable to about 1600, and above 3200 you're trading quality for getting the shot at all.

Here's the thing worth internalising, though: a slightly grainy photo of something wonderful beats a clean photo of nothing. Raise the ISO. Grain is a texture. Blur and missed moments are just gone. Never miss a shot to protect a number.

Putting the Three Together

They're linked. Change one, compensate with another.

Say your photo is too dark. You can:

• Open the aperture (more light, less depth of field)
• Slow the shutter (more light, more motion blur)
• Raise the ISO (more light, more grain)

There's no free option. Photography is choosing which side effect you want.

In practice you decide what the photo is about first, and let that pick your priority:

• This is about a person → aperture first, wide open, blur the background
• This is about movement → shutter first, fast to freeze or slow to smear
• This is about a place → aperture first, stopped down, everything sharp
• It's dark and I just need the shot → ISO up, aperture wide, shutter as slow as you can hold

This is exactly why the mode dial has Av, Tv and M on it. Each one lets you take charge of the setting you care about and hand the rest to the camera.

The Fourth Control Nobody Mentions: Exposure Compensation

Your camera's light meter is a machine, and it makes one specific, predictable mistake.

It assumes the world is averagely bright. So when you photograph something genuinely bright, snow, a white beach, a pale sky, the meter panics and darkens it into grey mush. And when you photograph something genuinely dark, a night scene, a dark room, it brightens it into flat grey.

Exposure compensation is you overruling it. The +/- dial on top.

• Snow, beach, bright sand, white buildings → dial to +1 or so. Otherwise your Canadian snow comes out grey.
• Night scenes, dark interiors, moody shots → dial to -1. Otherwise the camera ruins the mood by brightening everything.
• Someone backlit against a bright window or sky → +1 or +2, or they'll be a silhouette.

This one dial fixes more disappointing photos than anything else in this guide. Learn to reach for it without looking.

One warning: it stays where you put it. Set +2 for a snowy morning, forget about it, and everything you shoot that afternoon is overexposed. Get in the habit of glancing at it (it is shown on screen) and resetting to 0.

Focal Length, what zoom actually does

Your lens covers 24mm to 100mm. Most people treat zoom as "make the thing bigger". It's much more interesting than that: focal length changes the relationship between near and far.

• 24mm (wide): pushes everything apart. Foregrounds loom large, backgrounds recede. Great for landscapes, interiors, tight spaces, and for a sense of "I was standing right here". Also unflattering close to faces, because it enlarges whatever's nearest the lens, which is usually a nose.
• 50mm-ish (middle): roughly how your eye sees. Natural, honest, no drama. A good default.
• 100mm (zoomed): compresses. Distant things pile up closer together, backgrounds loom large behind your subject, and faces look their best. This is your portrait setting.

The practical version: for a photo of a person, zoom in and step back. Same framing, but far more flattering and a much blurrier background. For a photo of a place, go wide and get close to something interesting in the foreground.

The instinct to stand still and zoom is the one to unlearn. Your feet are a creative control.

Composition, arranging what's in the frame

Technically perfect photos can still be boring. Composition is the difference.

The rule of thirds. Split the frame into a 3×3 grid (that is the grid you turned on in setup). Put the important things on the lines or where they cross, rather than dead centre. Horizons go on the top or bottom line, not through the middle. Eyes go near a top intersection.

Like all rules it's a starting point, not a law. Dead-centre is powerful when it's deliberate.

Leading lines. Roads, fences, rivers, shadows, a boardwalk. Lines pull the eye into the picture. Find them and aim them at your subject.

Foreground. The single biggest upgrade to landscape photos. A view of mountains is flat. A view of mountains with rocks or flowers or a friend in the near foreground has depth, because the eye has somewhere to start.

Fill the frame. Beginners stand too far back. Whatever your subject is, get closer than feels natural. Then closer again.

Watch the background before you shoot. Check for a lamppost growing out of someone's head, a bin, a stranger mid-yawn. Two steps sideways fixes almost everything. This one habit separates people who take good photos from people who take lucky ones.

Straighten your horizons. A tilted sea looks wrong to everyone even if they can't say why. Use the grid.

Leave space in the direction of movement. Someone walking or looking left should have room on the left. Otherwise they feel cramped against the edge.

Simplify. The most common problem in a photo is too much stuff. Ask "what is this photo of?" and remove everything that isn't the answer.

Light, the thing that separates good from great

You can nail every setting and still take a dull photo, because the light was dull. Learning to notice light is the real skill, and it takes longer than learning any dial.

Quality:

• Hard light (midday sun, bare bulb, direct flash), sharp black shadows, high contrast, harsh on faces. Dramatic when you want drama, unkind when you don't.
• Soft light (overcast, shade, a big window, sunrise and sunset), gentle gradual shadows. Flattering for people, easy to expose. Overcast days are not bad photography weather; they're a giant softbox.

Direction. This is the one to actually learn:

• Front lighting (sun behind you), simple, safe, a bit flat and boring.
• Side lighting: light across your subject. Creates shadow, shows texture and shape, makes things look three-dimensional. Usually the most interesting choice.
• Back lighting (sun behind the subject), hardest and most beautiful. Glowing hair rims, haze, silhouettes. Your camera will try to make the subject a silhouette, so dial exposure compensation to +1 or +2 if you want their face.

Time of day:

• Golden hour: the hour after sunrise and before sunset. Low, warm, soft, directional. Everything looks better. This is not a myth and it is not a filter; it is just what happens.
• Blue hour: the twenty or thirty minutes after the sun has gone. Deep blue sky, city lights on, and the two balance. The best time for cities, by a distance.
• Midday: the hardest light of the day. Harsh, overhead, ugly shadows under eyes. Shoot in shade, use the flash to fill, or shoot something that suits contrast.

The habit that will make you a photographer: before you raise the camera, look at where the light is coming from and ask whether you should move. Not adjust a setting, move. Walk around your subject. Most of the time the better photo is fifteen feet to your left.

04Making Your Camera Do It

You know what aperture, shutter and ISO do. This is where you learn which dial on your G7 X gives you control of each one.

The Mode Dial

Ten positions. Here's what each actually is, and which ones matter.

Auto: the camera decides everything. Fine for a snapshot when you have two seconds. You will outgrow it quickly, and the whole point of buying this camera was to outgrow it.

Hybrid Auto: records a short clip before every photo and stitches the day into a little movie. A gimmick most of the time, genuinely lovely on a big day. Worth trying on a travel day at least once.

P (Program): the camera sets aperture and shutter, but you control ISO, white balance, exposure compensation, flash, focus, everything else. This is Auto with the handbrake off, and it's a perfectly respectable place to live while you're learning.

Av (Aperture priority), your main mode. You set the aperture with the control ring. The camera picks the matching shutter speed.

This is where most photographers spend most of their lives, because aperture is usually the creative decision, how blurred is the background. Set f/1.8 for people, f/5.6 to f/8 for landscapes, and let the camera handle the rest.

Watch the shutter speed the camera picks. If it drops below about 1/60, you're about to get a blurry shot. Raise your ISO or open the aperture.

Tv (Shutter priority): you set the shutter speed with the control ring, the camera picks the aperture. Use it when motion is the point: freezing someone jumping (1/1000), or blurring a waterfall (1/4).

M (Manual): you set both. On your camera: rear dial = shutter speed, control ring = aperture.

Manual isn't more advanced or more virtuous, it's just useful when the light is constant and you want the exposure locked so it can't drift shot to shot. Concerts, star photography, studio-ish setups, and anything where the camera's meter keeps changing its mind between frames.

C (Custom): save a full set-up and recall it instantly. Once you find a combination you use constantly (mine would be your campfire settings), store it here and it's one dial-click away.

SCN (Special Scene): pre-baked modes for specific situations. Mostly skippable, with genuinely valuable exceptions:

• Self Portrait: sensible defaults for the flipped screen
• Panorama: sweep the camera, it stitches. Excellent in Canada.
• Panning: helps you blur a moving background while keeping a moving subject sharp
• Star Portrait / Star Nightscape / Star Trails / Star Time-Lapse: four dedicated astro modes. See the stars recipe. These are a real gift at camp.

Movie: full video controls. Note you can start recording from any mode with the red button; you only need this position when you want proper control over video settings.

Creative Filters: in-camera effects, including Miniature. Fun, but they bake in permanently. Better to shoot clean and edit later.

Where To Find Everything: the Q Button

Press Q and you get the settings that matter, without the menu maze: ISO, white balance, drive mode, image quality, ND filter, metering, picture style, autofocus mode.

Learn this screen. It is 90% of your day-to-day control.

Focus

AF modes worth knowing:

• One-Shot AF: focuses once when you half-press, then locks. Use for anything still: landscapes, portraits, food, buildings. This is your default.
• Servo AF: keeps refocusing continuously while you hold the half-press. Use for anything moving: kids, dogs, sports, someone walking towards you.

Switching between them for the right subject is one of the fastest upgrades to your keeper rate.

Face detection: the camera finds faces and prioritises them. Leave it on for people. It's good, and it saves you thinking.

Tap to focus: the fastest control on the camera. Tap the thing you want sharp.

Manual focus: the left button on the rear dial. You'll want this in two places: near-total darkness where autofocus hunts and gives up (set focus to infinity for stars), and macro work where you want to choose the exact millimetre that's sharp. Turn on MF peaking in the menu and the in-focus edges glow, which makes manual focus genuinely easy rather than a guessing game.

Macro mode: also the left button. Lets you focus very close for flowers, food, details, textures. Get close, use it, and remember depth of field gets razor-thin up close, so you may want f/4 or f/5.6 rather than f/1.8 just to get the whole subject sharp.

Drive Modes, the Up button

• Single: one shot per press. Default.
• Continuous / burst: holds down and fires repeatedly. Essential for anything moving, and for group photos where someone always blinks. Fire six and one will be right.
• Self-timer: 2 or 10 seconds. The 2-second one has a hidden use: on a tripod for long exposures, it lets the camera stop wobbling from your finger press before it fires. Use it for every night shot on a tripod.

White Balance, getting colours right

Different light has different colour. Candlelight is deeply orange, shade is blue, fluorescent strip lights are sickly green. Your eyes correct for this automatically. Cameras need telling.

Auto white balance is genuinely good on this camera and right the large majority of the time. Leave it there to begin with.

Override it when:

• Indoor tungsten light makes everything orange and you don't want that → Tungsten preset
• Shade or overcast looks cold and blue → Cloudy or Shade preset, which warms it up
• You want to keep the warmth of a sunset or campfire → set Cloudy or Daylight rather than Auto, because Auto will try to neutralise the very orange you're there for

That last one is the pro move. Auto white balance "corrects" golden hour into something less golden. Take control and keep the gold.

And the safety net: if you shoot RAW, white balance is fully adjustable afterwards with zero quality loss. One more reason RAW is worth the card space.

The ND Filter

Your camera has a built-in neutral density filter, effectively sunglasses that slide in front of the sensor. Canon's spec: it cuts the light to 1/8, which is three stops.

Find it in the Q menu. Three settings: Auto, On, Off.

Why you'd want less light, which sounds mad:

1. Shallow depth of field in bright sun. You want f/1.8 for a blurred background on a bright Californian afternoon, but at f/1.8 there's far too much light even at your fastest shutter. ND filter on, problem solved.
2. Slow shutter in daylight. Silky waterfalls need a slow shutter. In daylight that's wildly overexposed. ND on, and you get the effect.

Auto is a sensible place to leave it. Switch to On deliberately for those two situations.

Reading The Screen

Press the INFO button (down on the rear dial) until you're seeing the full display. Learn these:

• Shutter speed and aperture: glance at these before every shot. If shutter is under 1/60 handheld, act.
• ISO: check it hasn't been left at 6400 from last night.
• Exposure compensation: check it's not still at +2 from the snow.
• Battery and shots remaining.
• The histogram: a graph of the brightness in your photo. Dark tones on the left, bright on the right. If it's jammed hard against the right edge you've blown your highlights and that detail is gone forever. Jammed against the left, you've crushed your shadows. Aim for the bulk of it sitting between the edges.

The histogram is far more reliable than judging from the screen, because the screen's brightness lies to you, especially outdoors in strong sun, where everything looks too dark, and at night, where everything looks bright enough. Trust the graph.

05The Recipes

Actual dial positions for actual situations. Find yours, set it, shoot, adjust.

These are starting points, not laws. If the photo's too dark or too bright, that's what exposure compensation is for.

California

Bright beach and blazing sun

The hardest light there is, and you'll have a lot of it.

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/5.6
• ISO: 125
• Exposure compensation: +0.7 to +1 (bright sand and sea fool the meter into making everything grey)
• ND filter: Auto

Shoot early or late if you possibly can. If you're stuck with midday, look for shade, or use the harshness deliberately, strong shadows, bold shapes, high contrast.

Watch out: sand and salt spray are the two things most likely to kill this camera. It has no weather sealing. Don't change position with the lens extended in a wind, keep it in a bag when not shooting, and never set it down on sand.

Sunsets over the Pacific

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/5.6 to f/8
• ISO: 125
• White balance: Cloudy or Daylight, not Auto: Auto will wash out the very colour you're there for
• Exposure compensation: -0.3 to -1 (slightly darker saturates the colours and stops the sky blowing out)

Two more things: don't leave when the sun goes down, because the ten minutes after are usually better than the sunset itself. And put something in the foreground, a person, a rock, a pier, so it isn't just a coloured sky.

Cities, and evenings out

Blue hour, that half hour after sunset, is the best time to photograph any city. Sky still deep blue, lights on, the two in balance.

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/2.8
• ISO: 400 to 1600, whatever keeps shutter above 1/60
• White balance: Auto

Once it's properly dark and you have somewhere solid to rest the camera:

• Mode: Av or M
• Aperture: f/4
• ISO: 125
• Shutter: 1 to 8 seconds (it'll be slow, that's the point)
• Self-timer: 2 seconds, so your finger press doesn't shake it
• Rest it on a wall, a bin, a railing. Car lights become long ribbons.

Redwoods, canyons, big landscapes

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/5.6 to f/8, sharp front to back
• ISO: 125
• Zoom: wide, 24mm
• Find a foreground. A rock, a fern, a trunk, a path. Without one, big landscapes photograph flat.

Under the redwood canopy it's darker than it looks. If shutter drops under 1/60, raise ISO to 400 or 800 without hesitation.

Canada

Mountains and lakes

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/8
• ISO: 125
• Zoom: wide for scale, or zoom to 100mm to compress the peaks and stack them dramatically. Try both, they are completely different photos
• Exposure compensation: 0, or +0.3 if there's snow

Reflections work best in the calm of early morning. Get up for it once; you'll be glad.

Also try Panorama mode in SCN here. This is exactly what it's for.

Snow

Snow is the classic case of the meter getting it wrong. Left alone, your camera will render brilliant white snow as depressing grey.

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/5.6
• ISO: 125
• Exposure compensation: +1 to +1.7 (not optional, this is the whole trick)
• White balance: Cloudy, to counter the blue cast snow picks up in shade

Cold kills batteries. Keep spares in an inside pocket against your body, and swap them in and out. A battery that seems dead in the cold often revives once warm.

And the big one: condensation. Bringing a cold camera into a warm room makes moisture form on and inside it, which is genuinely damaging. Before you go indoors, put the camera in a sealed plastic bag, squeeze the air out, and leave it bagged until it reaches room temperature. The condensation forms on the bag instead of your sensor.

Autumn colour

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/4 to f/5.6
• White balance: Cloudy, to push the warmth
• Overcast days are better than sunny ones for autumn colour, soft light saturates it, harsh sun bleaches it
• Backlighting is the move: shoot with the sun behind the leaves so they glow

Wildlife

100mm is not a wildlife lens. You will not be filling the frame with a distant bear, and you should not be trying.

What works instead: animal in landscape. Small creature, big environment, tells a better story anyway.

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/2.8, zoomed to 100mm
• ISO: 400 to 800, to keep the shutter fast
• AF: Servo
• Drive: continuous burst
• Shutter: aim for 1/500 or faster

Camp

Portraits of your friends

The setting you'll use most all summer.

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/1.8 to f/2.8: wide open
• Zoom: in, to 85 to 100mm, and step back. Far more flattering than standing close and going wide.
• ISO: as low as the light allows
• AF: One-Shot, face detection on
• Light: put them in open shade, or with the sun behind them and exposure compensation at +1

The trick nobody tells you: move them away from the background. Someone against a wall can't have a blurred background. Ten feet forward and the background dissolves.

Group photos

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/4 to f/5.6: you need depth of field so the back row is sharp too. f/1.8 will leave half of them blurry.
• Drive: continuous burst, fire five or six, because someone always blinks
• Timer: 10 seconds if you're in it

Put the camera on something solid rather than handing it to a stranger.

Campfires

Your camera will genuinely shine here, and phones will not.

• Mode: Av or M
• Aperture: f/1.8: wide open, all the light you can get
• ISO: 1600 to 3200. Yes, really. Grain is fine. Missing it is not.
• White balance: Cloudy or Daylight, not Auto: keep the fire orange rather than letting the camera neutralise it
• Exposure compensation: -0.7 (let the darkness stay dark, that is the atmosphere)
• Brace your elbows, or rest the camera on a log

Faces lit by firelight from below is one of the most atmospheric kinds of portrait there is. Get close.

Stars

Away from city lights, which is exactly where camp will be, your camera can do something your phone can only fake.

Try the dedicated modes first: SCN → Star Nightscape for stars above a landscape, Star Portrait for a person under stars, Star Trails for the streaked-circles effect, Star Time-Lapse for a video of the sky turning.

Or do it manually:

• Mode: M
• Aperture: f/1.8
• Shutter: 15 seconds (much longer and stars streak, because the earth turns)
• ISO: 1600 to 3200
• Focus: manual, set to infinity. Autofocus cannot cope with stars
• Zoom: widest, 24mm
• Self-timer: 2 seconds
• Essential: the camera must be completely still. Tripod, or wedged on a rock or bag.

Note from Canon's manual for Star Trails: a session can run up to about two hours, so check your battery before starting.

Give it a go on a clear moonless night. The first time you see what comes back is a genuinely brilliant moment.

Action, sports and general chaos

• Mode: Tv
• Shutter: 1/500 to freeze, 1/1000 for something fast
• ISO: Auto, or high enough to hold that shutter
• AF: Servo
• Drive: continuous burst
• Pre-focus where the action is heading rather than chasing it

Everywhere

Food

• Mode: Av
• Aperture: f/2.8 to f/4 (f/1.8 is often too blurry, half the plate goes soft)
• Light: next to a window, never overhead restaurant lighting, and never the flash
• Angle: straight down for flat plates, low and level for anything with height
• Macro mode for details

Someone against a bright window or sky

The commonest failure in photography, and it's the meter again.

• Exposure compensation: +1 to +2, or you get a silhouette
• Or pop the flash up to fill their face
• Or use AE lock: point at their face, press the ⁕ button to lock the exposure, recompose, shoot

Rain and bad weather

Bad weather makes better photographs than blue sky. Reflections in wet pavement, dramatic cloud, umbrellas, mist.

But: no weather sealing. Keep it under a jacket, dry it immediately, and don't push it.

Aeroplane windows

• Lens as close to the glass as possible, almost touching, to kill reflections
• Mode: Av, aperture f/4
• Shutter: keep above 1/500, the plane vibrates constantly
• Focus: if autofocus hunts on empty sky, switch to manual and set infinity
• Turn off any cabin lights near you, and shoot from the shaded side

Fireworks

• Mode: M
• Aperture: f/8
• Shutter: 2 to 4 seconds
• ISO: 125
• Focus: manual, infinity
• Camera resting on something solid, 2-second timer
• Start the exposure just as a shell launches, so you capture the whole burst

06Video and Vlogging

This is the camera that became famous for video, so it's worth knowing properly.

The Settings

For most things, 1080p at 60fps. Sharp, smooth, manageable file sizes, and you can slow it to half speed in editing and it still looks good.

For things you want to keep forever, 4K at 30fps. Much more detail, much bigger files. Also lets you crop in afterwards without losing quality, which effectively gives you a second camera angle.

For slow motion, 1080p at 120fps. Played back at normal speed this is a quarter speed. Excellent for jumping into lakes, hair in the wind, anything at camp.

The Recording Limits, read this before you rely on it

Straight from Canon's manual, and these catch people out:

• 4K clips stop automatically at 9 minutes 59 seconds
• Full HD and HD stop at 29 minutes 59 seconds
• 120fps slow motion stops at 7 minutes 29 seconds, and records no sound at all

That last one matters, don't film a speech in slow motion expecting audio.

The Overheating Rule

This camera gets hot recording 4K, and Canon is explicit about it. If you see "Overheated! Shutting down", turn it off and wait at least 5 minutes. If you want to record another full-length 4K clip, Canon says leave it off for 20 minutes or more.

Practical advice: don't shoot 4K continuously all day. Use 1080p for everyday filming and save 4K for things that deserve it. Keep the camera out of direct sun and out of a hot bag between takes. And remember the date/time/zone must be set for the temperature warnings to work correctly.

Vlogging With The Flip Screen

Push the screen up and over. It goes a full 180° and faces forward, showing you a mirror image.

• Mode: SCN → Self Portrait, or Movie mode
• Hold the camera slightly above eye level and angled down: universally more flattering
• Stay within arm's length or the built-in mic struggles
• Keep fingers off the top of the camera: the stereo mic is up there and Canon specifically warns that covering it muffles everything
• Shoot with light on your face, not behind you. A window in front of you is the best free lighting there is.

Audio is the thing that actually matters. Viewers forgive rough footage and abandon bad audio instantly. If you get serious, the 3.5mm mic socket on the side takes a small plug-in mic and the improvement is dramatic, more than any change to picture settings.

Video Technique

Move less than you think. Static shots look professional. Constant panning and swooping looks amateur and makes people seasick. If you must move, move slowly and smoothly, and start recording a few seconds before and after.

Shoot in short clips. Ten seconds each, lots of them. Far easier to edit than one endless take, and you'll actually use them.

Get variety. For any scene, grab a wide shot to establish where you are, a medium shot, and a close detail. Three clips of the same moment cuts together into something that feels made rather than recorded.

Shutter speed for video: the natural-looking rule is shutter speed roughly double your frame rate. At 30fps use 1/60, at 60fps use 1/125. Faster looks unnaturally stuttery. This is where the ND filter earns its place, in bright sun it's the only way to keep the shutter that slow.

Lock your exposure before recording if you're panning between bright and dark, or the brightness will visibly pump up and down mid-shot.

Time-Lapse

The camera has a built-in time-lapse movie mode, and it's one of the most rewarding things it does. Clouds over mountains, shadows crossing a valley, a sunset compressed to fifteen seconds.

Requirements: the camera completely still for the whole session, and plenty of battery. Set it up when you're sitting somewhere for a while anyway.

There's also Star Time-Lapse in SCN, which films the sky rotating. Canon notes that even set to unlimited, recording stops after about 8 hours, and that the optional USB power adapter lets you run it without worrying about battery.

07Travelling With It

Power and Cards

Batteries. Your camera takes the Canon NB-13L. A single one will not get you through a full day of shooting, and it certainly won't get you through a day of video.

Buy two spares before you fly. Genuine Canon ones are expensive; well-reviewed third-party ones are fine for spares. Charge everything the night before, every night, without exception. Make it as automatic as charging your phone.

Cold drains them fast, so in Canada keep spares in an inside pocket where your body heat keeps them alive.

Charging. The camera charges over USB-C, which is the useful part: the same power bank that charges your phone will charge your camera on a coach, a trail or a flight. Take a decent power bank and a spare cable.

Watch the indicator light: steady orange means charging, blinking orange means a charging error: usually a weak adapter or a bad cable.

Charging in-camera means you can't shoot while it charges, so a separate external charger for the spares is a genuinely good buy. Then one charges while another is in the camera.

Memory cards. Get two or three cards rather than one big one. If a card fails or gets lost, you lose part of the trip instead of all of it. 64GB or 128GB each, and for 4K video make sure they're reasonably fast (look for U3 or V30 on the card).

Format each one in the camera before you go. Keep the spares in a small hard case, not loose in a bag.

Backing Up While You're Away

Cameras get lost, dropped, stolen and left in taxis. Photos of California are irreplaceable; the camera is not.

Do at least one of these, ideally two:

1. Copy to a laptop or phone every few days. Anything is better than nothing.
2. Swap cards: once a card is full, put it somewhere separate from the camera and start a fresh one. Don't reformat it just to save space.
3. Upload the good ones to cloud storage whenever you have decent wifi. Even just the ones you love.

The rule that matters: the photos and the camera should not spend every night in the same bag.

Getting Photos Onto Your Phone

You'll want to post from your phone, so set this up before you travel, at home, where the wifi works.

1. Install Canon Camera Connect on your phone.
2. On the camera, press the Wi-Fi button.
3. Follow the pairing steps. It uses Bluetooth to find the camera, then Wi-Fi to move the files.

It's fiddly the first time and easy every time after. Two things worth knowing:

• Transfer the JPEGs, not the RAWs. RAW files are huge and your phone can't do much with them. That's exactly why you set the camera to shoot both.
• You can shrink images during transfer if you're only posting them.

The app also does remote shooting: your phone becomes a live viewfinder and shutter button. Genuinely useful for group photos with you in them, and for anything on a tripod where touching the camera would shake it.

Looking After It

No weather sealing. The single most important sentence in this section. This camera is not sealed against water, dust or sand.

Sand and salt (California). Sand in the lens mechanism is often a repair, not a clean. Never put the camera down on sand. Don't zoom in windy, sandy conditions. Wipe it with a slightly damp cloth after beach days to get salt off, and dry it properly.

Water. Get it out of the rain and under a jacket. If it does get wet, off immediately, battery out, card out, dry thoroughly, and leave it a full day before switching on.

Cold and condensation (Canada). Covered in the snow recipe, and worth repeating because it's the one that quietly damages cameras: bag it before you go from cold outside into a warm room. Sealed plastic bag, air squeezed out, leave it until it's warmed to room temperature. The moisture forms on the bag rather than inside your lens.

The lens. Only ever clean it with a proper microfibre cloth and a blower. Never your t-shirt, never a tissue. Both scratch coatings. Blow the dust off first, then wipe gently.

Storage. Screen closed, in a padded case or a sock inside your bag. Never loose with keys.

Airports. Cameras and batteries go in your hand luggage, not the hold. That is an airline rule for lithium batteries, not just advice. Modern scanners won't harm your memory cards.

The One That Will Sting

Your camera is small, valuable and instantly recognisable. Don't leave it on a café table, don't leave it visible in a car, and use the wrist strap when you're near water or a drop.

Check whether it's covered on a travel or home insurance policy before you go. It's a five-minute job that occasionally saves several hundred pounds.

08When It Goes Wrong

Work down each list. The causes are in order of how often they're actually the problem.

My photos are blurry

1. You jabbed the shutter. Half-press, wait for focus confirmation, then press. This is the cause most of the time.
2. Shutter speed too slow. Check it. Under 1/60 handheld and you're fighting your own hands. Raise ISO, open the aperture, or brace against something.
3. You zoomed in. At 100mm you need roughly 1/100 or faster. Zooming magnifies your shake as well as the subject.
4. The camera focused on the wrong thing. Tap the screen on what you want sharp.
5. The subject moved. Different problem, needs a faster shutter, not steadier hands.
6. Depth of field is too shallow. At f/1.8 up close, only a couple of centimetres are sharp. Their eyes are sharp and their nose isn't? Stop down to f/4.

My photos are too dark

1. Exposure compensation: dial it positive.
2. Backlighting. Bright window or sky behind your subject means the meter exposes for the background. +1 or +2, or use AE lock on their face.
3. The light genuinely isn't there. Open to f/1.8, raise the ISO, accept some grain.

My photos are too bright, or the sky is pure white

1. Exposure compensation: dial it negative.
2. Check the histogram. Piled against the right edge means blown highlights, and blown highlights are unrecoverable. There is no detail there to bring back, even in RAW.
3. Bright sky, dark ground? That's a scene with more contrast than any camera can hold. Either expose for the sky and let the ground go dark, or shoot at golden hour when the difference is smaller.

My night photos look terrible

1. ISO too low, so the shutter went so slow you shook it. Raise ISO to 1600 to 3200.
2. Aperture not wide open. f/1.8 at night, always.
3. Not braced. Rest it on something solid and use the 2-second timer.
4. Auto white balance killed the mood. Try Cloudy.
5. You used the flash. It lights the nearest three feet and turns the rest black. Put it away.

The autofocus keeps hunting and won't lock

1. Not enough light or contrast. Aim at an edge, where light meets dark, rather than a flat surface.
2. Too close. Switch to macro mode.
3. Shooting through glass, which confuses it. Get the lens right against the glass.
4. It's very dark. Switch to manual focus and use MF peaking.

The colours look wrong

Everything orange: indoor tungsten light, switch white balance to Tungsten. Everything blue: you're in shade, switch to Shade or Cloudy. Sunset looks flat and disappointing: Auto white balance neutralised it. Switch to Cloudy or Daylight.

And if you shot RAW, all of this is fixable afterwards in seconds.

It says the card is full, or won't take a photo

• Card genuinely full, swap it.
• Card locked. There is a tiny physical slide switch on the side of SD cards. Slide it back.
• Try formatting in the camera, having copied everything off first.

It says "Overheated! Shutting down"

Normal for 4K video. Turn it off, wait at least 5 minutes, and 20 minutes before another long 4K clip. Get it out of the sun.

Nothing works and I don't know why

Turn it off and on. If it's still odd, take the battery out for thirty seconds. If it's still odd, there's a "reset to defaults" option in the settings menu. You will lose your setup but you'll have a working camera.

09After The Shot

RAW and JPEG, once more

Your JPEGs are the ones you post tonight. Your RAWs are the ones you'll be grateful for in ten years.

A RAW file looks flat and lifeless straight out of the camera, and beginners often conclude RAW is worse. It isn't, it just hasn't been finished yet. All that flatness is recoverable detail waiting to be used.

What RAW lets you fix that JPEG can't:

• Brighten shadows dramatically without them turning to mud
• Recover detail in a sky that looked lost
• Change white balance completely, after the fact, for free
• Push colour and contrast hard without the image falling apart

Editing

Two free apps, both excellent, both on your phone:

Lightroom Mobile: the serious one. Opens your RAW files, syncs across devices, and everything is non-destructive so you can always go back.

Snapseed: free, fast, brilliant for quick work. Its Selective tool lets you brighten just one part of a photo, which is a genuinely powerful thing to have on a phone.

A sensible editing order:

1. Crop and straighten first, decide what the photo is before adjusting anything
2. Exposure, so the overall brightness is right
3. Shadows up, highlights down: recovers the extremes
4. Contrast, a little
5. White balance, to taste
6. Saturation or vibrance, gently, vibrance is the more subtle of the two
7. Sharpening, last, and lightly

The discipline that matters more than the technique: edit less than you want to. The commonest mistake is pushing everything until the photo looks impressive on a phone screen and garish everywhere else. Get it to where you like it, then pull back about twenty percent.

And be ruthless about what you keep. A hundred photos from a day is a chore for anyone to look at. Ten great ones is a story. Delete freely, you'll never miss the ones you cut, and your best work is judged by your average, not your maximum.

10Getting Good

Nobody learned photography by reading. Here are things to actually go and do. One a day, ten minutes each.

Understanding the controls

1. Photograph the same thing at f/1.8 and f/8. Compare the backgrounds.
2. Photograph something moving at 1/1000 and at 1/15. Compare.
3. Photograph one scene at ISO 125 and ISO 6400. Zoom into both. Find where noise starts to bother you, now you know your own limit.
4. Take one photo at -2, 0 and +2 exposure compensation. Watch the meter be wrong.
5. Photograph a friend at 24mm and then at 100mm from further back. Look at what it does to their face.

Learning to see 6. Take twenty photos without moving your feet. Forces you to actually look. 7. Take twenty photos of one object from twenty angles. 8. Photograph only shadows for a day. 9. Photograph the same spot at midday and at golden hour. 10. Photograph something backlit and make it work. 11. Find five leading lines in one street. 12. Take a photo where the subject is deliberately tiny in a big frame.

Composition 13. Put your subject on a third, never centre, for a whole day. 14. Take five photos where a strong foreground gives depth. 15. Fill the entire frame with your subject. Then get closer. 16. Photograph something reflective, a puddle, a window, a lake. 17. Find a frame within the frame, a doorway, an arch, branches.

People 18. Photograph someone doing something rather than posing. 19. Take a portrait using only window light. 20. Photograph hands, feet, or the back of someone's head. Portraits without faces. 21. Take a photo of someone laughing genuinely. Hard, and worth it.

Harder things 22. Shoot a full roll's worth, say 36 photos, in manual mode only. 23. Photograph the same scene every hour for a day. 24. Get one properly sharp photo at 1/15 handheld. Braced, breathing out. 25. Shoot stars. 26. Make a five-second time-lapse. 27. Photograph water: frozen with a fast shutter, then silky with a slow one. 28. Take one photo you'd print and put on a wall. 29. Go out for an hour and come back with exactly three photos. Not thirty. Three. 30. Look back at day one. See how far you've come.

11The Cheat Card

Screenshot this. It works with no signal.

THE FOUR THINGS TO CHECK BEFORE EVERY SHOT

1. Shutter speed above 1/60? (higher if zoomed in)
2. Exposure compensation back at 0?
3. ISO not still at 6400 from last night?
4. What's happening in the background?

QUICK SETTINGS

THE FIXES

• Too dark → exposure compensation plus
• Too bright → exposure compensation minus
• Blurry → faster shutter, or brace it
• Background not blurred → zoom in, move them away from the wall
• Colours wrong → change white balance
• Won't focus → tap the screen, or aim at an edge

THE LIMITS

• 4K stops at 9:59 · Full HD at 29:59 · slow-mo at 7:29 and has no sound
• Overheated? Off for 5 minutes, 20 before more 4K
• Not weather sealed. Sand and salt are the real enemies.

THE THREE THAT MATTER MOST

1. Half-press, then press.
2. Move your feet before you touch a dial.
3. Look at the light before you look at the camera.