Last summer I jumped into the world of Canon mirrorless cameras with a blend of caution and enthusiasm. I recognise that many of my colleagues made the DSLR to mirrorless switch way before I did but, being the anorak that I am, I was determined to make the swap work for me. Having used Canon SLRs and DSLRs for over twenty five years it was always going to be an interesting time and it has taken me five months to iron out all of the niggles. The funny thing is that 90% of the change was painless and happened in under a month. It has been the one part of my work that I was always well known for that has taken me an age to completely master.

Flash.

My initial exposure to the world of mirrorless was shooting conferences with available light followed by a few other jobs which also served to lull me into a false sense of security because they were all flash-free. I was enjoying the silent electronic shutter, exposure simulation and general ease of use of my pair off R6s and really hadn’t fully got my head around flash (in general) and off-camera flash (in particular). In fact, when I was booked to shoot a load of headshots I reverted to my EOS5D MkIVs because I felt so much more confident of working with them and flash. I knew that if the swap to mirrorless was going to work out I’d need to get completely comfortable with the R6s and the R5 pretty quickly.

One morning when I had no paid work I decided to conquer flash with Canon mirrorless and so I did what every self-respecting anorak does – I played around with settings and made a list. The list became a spreadsheet showing where I would expect every relevant setting to be when I started to shoot ambient or flash:

Once I had this table of options of what I considered the ideal starting point for both flash and ambient I tried to work out the ideal way to leave cameras in the bag – in just the same way that I had left my EOS5D MkIVs and all of their predecessors going back to the days before I even swapped to Canon. Things were so much simpler back then; there were so few settings to think about.

It was at this point that I realised that there is a function on modern cameras that allows me to do all of this very easily. There’s the custom function options. Three of them (C1, C2 and C3) on an R6 and so I did the only sensible thing that assigned C1 on all cameras to my ambient light defaults and C3 to my flash defaults. All I had to do was to set the cameras up with my flash defaults, go into the menu and select page 5 of the camera set-up (spanner) options and go to Custom Shooting Mode > Register Settings > Custom Shooting Mode: C3 and register them.

From there I set the camera for my ambient default settings and repeated the process this time using Custom Shooting Mode C1. After that I just did the other cameras to match and life was going to be much easier. I have since tinkered with my base settings and also registered a different configuration in C2 but the concept remains the same – I can now swap between flash and ambient with the turn of a dial on an R6 and the press of a button or two on an R5.

Of course the joke (on me) is that these options have been around for years and I was always “too much of a pro” to make use of them. The further joke is that there are dozens of other options in the menus that I could probably find a use for. I had this pretty much worked out after two months of R6 ownership but it has taken me since then to refine it and get to the stage where it has become part of the way that I work. From there I feel sufficiently confident to blog about it.

Once I get thinking about this stuff I find it hard to stop and so, if anyone from Canon is reading this, I have a short wish list relating to this kind of set up for future cameras or maybe a simple firmware upgrade for current and recently replaced models.

• The ability to set up a camera by connecting it to EOS Utility and then save a configuration file that can be copied to other cameras
• The ability to “grey-out” some menu functions so that they cannot be set by accident
• To be able to read a list of functions that have been set in C1-C3
• To eventually have a camera where once I connect and turn on a flash it automatically goes to my pre-defined flash settings and away from them again when the flash is turned off or removed

I am not saying that I ever stop learning about kit and adapting the way that I work but I have now arrived at that reasonably happy place where I have confidence in my knowledge of these cameras and can pretty much do everything without having to think too much which, in turn, allows me to get back to being creative and leave the techie stuff to my sub-conscious again.