Crazy me got a 5D

[neuroanatomist]

Your setting now seems quite natural: One button for AF, and one for AE. In AF-Single the buttons each measure-and-lock if pressed and then released. It's nearly symmetric, except that the shutter defaults to metering the exposure if you didn't do an explicit AE-lock,

Exactly why I prefer that setting.

you might want to focus manually (and how often have I destroyed my manual focus by releasing and half-pressing the shutter, made FTM seem a bit clumsy and I often ended up switching to MF, which somehow defeats the purpose of FTM).

Yep. Although I didn't know it at the time, we could have assigned a simliar functionality to the T1i's AE Lock (*) button by setting C.Fn-10 Shutter/AE Lock to 1 (AE Lock/AF). That setting actually duplicates the way Dave set up his 5DII - the shutter button does AE lock but not AF, but that's as close as the T1i could get. It would help the MF issues, and be fine as long as you were taking single shots with a full press of the shutter release.


One more tip regarding the way I have it set up. You may find yourself hitting AE lock (*) inadvertently when trying to press AF-ON. If you never use AE Lock, you may be able to turn that function off or set it so it's the same as AF-ON (meter + AF start) - I can on the 7D, not sure if that's possible on the 5DII. But one thing I recently learned is that you can cancel an AE lock (instead of waiting for it to time out on its own) by pressing the AF point selection button (with the + magnifying glass, just to the right of *).

[Colin500]

One more tip regarding the way I have it set up. You may find yourself hitting AE lock (*) inadvertently when trying to press AF-ON. If you never use AE Lock, you may be able to turn that function off or set it so it's the same as AF-ON (meter + AF start) - I can on the 7D, not sure if that's possible on the 5DII.

Can't remember that function, but on the 5DII you can turn off the AF-ON button, and you can (then) swap the function of the AF-ON and the AE-Lock buttons around ... if it works as the description sounds, it should achieve the same thing.

But one thing I recently learned is that you can cancel an AE lock (instead of waiting for it to time out on its own) by pressing the AF point selection button (with the + magnifying glass, just to the right of *).

Heh, telepathy: I just configured your settings, and then tried to cancel AE-Lock by pressing it again, but of course it didn't work. Then I thought hm, there must be some simple way to cancel that lock, and pressed the AF-point-select button, and hey presto ;-)


Ciao, Colin