Trying to love my 7D

[Brian McKenna]

I am a hobbyist who shoots with a 7d with 17-55 f2.8 and 70-200 f4.0 L glass.  I am pulling my hair out with the focus issues with this camera.  Some are 100% incredibly tack sharp, but most (80%) are not.  The camera and 70-200 have been to Canon CPS recently where I got the email that the Auto Focus mechanism was off, etc, etc.  I got the camera back with great expectations, only to be disappointed at its performance.  It is great at still subjects, but when photographing moving objects like players at my daughter's soccer game, the results are very disappointing.   I am very familiar with the settings and different auto focus modes, so I am wondering if its me of the camera.  I've had the camera over a year, and am ready to put it under the front tire of my car.  Images that appear sharp on the LCD, are not sharp when viewed at 100%.  As stated before, some images are sharp at 100%, but the majority of them are not.  I shoot handheld, at high shutter speeds, mainly baseball, Blue Angels, and kid soccer.  I am ready to crush this and move to Nikon, but I don't want to.  I am trying hard to love my 7D.  So far, not so much.  Sometimes, I have the AF points shown on the camera, and they are exactly on the subject, but the picture is grossly out of focus.  Can't figure this out.

[John Montgomery]

Brian:  I spent a good part of my day trying to figure out what the issue was with the focus.  I first found some purported professional settings for scenery shooting and began setting up using C-1.  I began rotating through my three lenses lenses and I was getting consistently blurry shots.  Anyway after much trial and error I stumbled across a working setting which I will share with you here.  Keep in mind this is scenery only on a bright day.  I will work on moving targets later.  ISO 100.....exposure/comp "0"......auto select 19 point AF........Landscape.......AWB.........evaluative metering..........high........L 5184x3456......AI Servo AF......single or low speed.......two settings that I changed that started resulting in clean shots was the ISO which I had on auto.  I noticed that on auto it was shooting as high as 3200 ISO which will definitely result in some soft photos.  So I forced it to shoot at 100 and that fixed that.  Second was the AF.  All the pro's were saying to shoot scenery on one shot which does make perfect sense to me.  But it was not working.  So I changed it to AI Servo and low and behold nicely focused shots.  After being pretty sure I had scenery figured out.  I went down to the marina near my home and shot 8 photos through boats using my sigma 18-250 at various focal lengths.  All of the pictures when reviewed on my computer were sharp and clear through all the focal lengths.  Boats had a lot of numbers and names at various distances and they were sharp and focused.   I think this setting will work well even on a darker or cloud day.  I would increase the ISO setting accordingly though.  I don't trust the 7d auto ISO mode anymore.  

[John Montgomery]

Also play around with the exposure/comp setting, I think I could have mine set for a little less exposure today.