You are taking advantage of the same system used by autofocus so kind of yes. In my hands I feel I get more focus precision by taking charge and using manual focus. Maybe it is just personal preference or maybe there are reasons it gives better control. Blind use of autofocus is definitely bad, but autofocus on Canon mirrorless cameras offers a lot of customisation and maybe gives you the control that you like. In the end you have to make up your own mind what works for you. For me it is definitely manual focus. I also like the touch focus offered by the backscreen.
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OK, I wasn’t 100% sure; thanks.
Yep, I’ll have to build myself a “circumstances → focus mode” mental mapping like I did at some point with the other camera.
Regarding the touch screen, though, using it really makes me stretch my fingers at weird angles while struggling to maintain the camera. No idea how people manage to use that smoothly. The best I can do is point the camera down to alleviate the pull of the lens’ weight, touch the screen at an approximately good place (without being sure because the subject is not in sight anymore), and then use the joystick a little bit to fine-tune the location. Well… of course it would be a trivial matter with a tripod, but apart from that… 
Same here. For landscapes I like the positivity manual focus gives, although touch-to-focus comes close. My main problem is with my (older-ish) Sigma 17-70, whose focus ring rotates only about 60 from close to infinity. That gets a bit fiddly when trying to critical-focus. It can be done but I have to call on my (amateur astronomy) telescope-focusing skills. 
: rock back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth … ah, there it is… wait, drat! Try again …
Maybe I just need to update my lens. I’ve been looking at a used EF 24-70 f/4 L so who knows…
I have not made myself clear enough. The touch focus works by you touching where the subject is, the camera uses AF to get subject in focus and then immediately triggers the shutter. There is no opportunity to use the toggle. This works best with camera on tripod or camera held at arms length with one hand and the other being used to trigger focus by touching screen. I suspect what you are talking about is moving the focus point by touching the screen which is something very different.
That’s interesting 
I would have naively said that for landscapes you use a large f-number anyway and can stop caring that much about where the focus ends up. (NB: I think I’m pretty bad at capturing landscapes. 
)
Oh indeed. So many concepts with similar names… 
I think I deactivated the possibility to directly capture an image that way. 
I tried MF during lunch break, on random flowers and such.
The triangle thingies and the red outlines are neat and fun to use. BUT:
- Once the triangles are lined up, I’m like “Did that actually do what I wanted? Is the focus point even exactly where I think it is?”,
- so I press the
button to magnify the view and fine-tune the focus (via ring or physical movement, etc.). - The triangles and outlines are not shown when in magnification mode (at least not with my setup)…
- … so I then realize I’m back to (more or less) the same point I’m going through when using the “One-shot AF then MF” mode.
Am I missing something obvious?
Wait… *Takes his camera again*
Huuuum do you basically trust the colored outlines instead of attempting to display magnifications? They seem to be more precise than I thought. My main concern was about shooting a figure vaguely from the side: their faces are fairly rugged surfaces, so I did not want the aligned triangles to make me focus the wrong (farthest) eye or the nose or whatever. But it turns out that the colored outlines are rather good at showing how the focus is distributed on the face, so I can tell the triangles “leave me alone now that I’m almost there, I don’t care what you say anymore” and just try to get the colored outline mostly on the nearest eye while still spreading somewhat on the farthest one. And then I start to see some added value to MF. But perhaps there’s more to it?
Trivia: In French, the colored outlines and the triangles are called (I don’t even remember in which order) repères and guides. Those are more or less synonyms… How was I supposed not to get confused, haha…
I also think I’m too used to post-processed pictures, because I’m always kinda disappointed by the focus even on unmissable shots. And as always, my stupid mind goes “Perhaps that’s a malfunction”.
Not related to ↑: lighting topic
There’s lots of sun right now so I tried, on a random object, the transparent circle from my 5-in-1 60 cm reflector. Am I really supposed to do:
Sun→|→Subject
… rather than:
Sun
↘|
↙|
Subject
…? It seems to block nearly as much light as if it were not transparent But perhaps the difference is more noticeable through the camera than via my eyes. I’ll have to conduct a more thorough test.
Also, while 60 cm is enough when reflecting light towards a tiny subject, it’s probably a whole other story when it comes to filtering the sun and ensuring that the shade encompasses the whole subject and that the sun-to-shade transition around is not too noticeable on the picture. But again, my test was quick and lame.
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Ahh…a much more interesting word than my triangles. But the reperes is linked to where the focusing point has been chosen. So if that point is over the closest eye and the triangles line up you can be very confident that eye is sharp and in focus. The colored outlines confirm this and also reveals that much more of the image is sharp. This helps to give you confidence.
Of course using the magnification button is a very good option as well. When you use the magnification and then go back to full view I would expect the triangles to be lined up and the colored outline confirming that you have selected the focus well.
I am not aware of being able to have focus peaking showing with AF on the Canon R6 or R7. I would love someone to correct me on this if I am wrong, because I can see the advantage of having focus peaking confirming the AF has done the job.
As for the diffuser. I use these when I have a bright harsh light source such as direct sunlight. This gives a soft directional light. I can afford the loss of light in these circumstances. I use reflectors less often and then I tend to mainly use the white one and dislike the silver or gold for most instances. With flash I tend to dislike direct flash and will try and bounce flash of surfaces including white cards, ceilings, walls, or studio umbrellas. Soft boxes can also be nice with studio flashes which are based on the diffuser principle.
Light has a few qualities including color, intensity, harshness, direction and with the case of flash duration. This gives the photographer a lot to master and control in obtaining the best image possible. Have fun.
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The thing is, if I don’t use a tripod, the slightest move can ruin that confidence and make the triangles go crazy. 
The same goes, to some extent, for getting out of magnification and assuming that things will forever remain like they were when I checked them during magnification. But yeah the red outlines make up for those issues for the most part.
One thing I’ll have to try (I’m not home right now) is the magnification-less version of the “One-shot AF then MF” mode, to see if it’s compatible with the two MF-helping features we mentioned. Low hope but worth a try.
OK, so I guess it’s normal to lose a lot. I suppose the level of “transparency” of mine is standard enough. It’s a cheap Godox thingy.
I’m still worried about the risk of seeing the shaded area’s boundary in the background (“Why the hell is the sun significantly harsher there than here?”, etc.), but I’ll have to conduct real tests for that. It’ll probably be OK with certain angles more than others.
Yeah, I suppose my dumb test, relying on my eyes alone, wasn’t really able to judge all this. Really need to shoot something for real to check.
This is true any time you use hand held and nothing will resolve that except a tripod. However, the focus peaking will show if you shift too much and lose the focus on the subject.
With close up photography there is really close up such as the transistor that @123sg photographed. That would have been incredibly difficult to photograph hand held since DoF was around 1mm so a tripod was probably essential. With your figurine examples I do not call that macro photography because they are not that small. Those shots could be photographed using manual focus by turning the focus ring and using the guide. With a small aperture DoF would be great enough to forgive slight body movement. But I would still recommend a tripod for shots like that unless you are travelling and find yourself without a tripod. At home I would use a tripod.
This might be a case of overthinking the problem. Most quality films and TV shows use diffusers to light the actors at times in outdoor shoots.
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I’m not against the idea at all, but I have yet to conduct proper research on that and on what kind of tripod would be convenient for near-ground level. That’s in my backlog.
Overthinking problems is a thing I’m good at.
Hum yeah but with human beings, since their head is relatively far from the ground, the pictures generally don’t show the ground right behind the subject, so obviously the diffuser’s shadow’s boundaries are not in sight. It might get trickier with my habit of shooting small, lower things. But perhaps the smaller size of my reflector / diffuser may actually be a good thing: the boundary will be closer, so easier to keep out of the frame.
I also think I have… how can I say it? A bad image of shade. I always saw clouds and the like as a bane. Probably because of the noise I was getting with the older camera. Now I’m starting to realize that it can actually be more convenient than scorching sun. Sure, it gives “subdued” results, but it may be better than blowing retinas up:
(Yes, I spam that figure before switching to others. Don’t want to fill my head with too many projects and ideas in parallel, especially when I already feel overwhelmed by the new camera itself.)
And as usual, thanks a lot for sticking around and providing those inputs. 
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Guuuuuys (and gals)! It actually works! What was preventing the triangles and colored outlines was actually not the AF part but the magnification during MF.
- AF (One-shot, probably not working with servo)
- AF → MF peaking settings → ON
- AF → Focus guide → ON
- Lens electronic MF → One-Shot→enabled (NOT “One-Shot→enabled (magnify)”)
- Lens in “Focus” mode rather than “Control”
There’s only one hitch: the triangles and outlines appear only when you start turning the focus ring, otherwise it’s just behaving like an AF-only approach.
I suppose this also works on the R7.
And if I feel like using magnification for one shot I guess there’s still the button.
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Thanks for the info. I will keep this in mind. How do you find the triangles and focus peaking. I set my focus peaking to yellow rather than red.
I’m still sometimes clumsily turning the ring in the wrong direction As for the color, I almost switched to something else than red because of that damned figure with red-ish eyes, haha, but ended up just shrugging it off. I should still take a look at those options for the heck of it at some point.
As expected, not having to rely on magnification prevented lots of wasted shots with lame framing. At least I can see what I’m doing.
Another thing that helped in that regard (even if I did not see the point of that setting at first) was to switch the EVF to the mode that slightly reduces the image displayed in it: it leaves a tiny black margin around the preview. That way, even if my eye is not perfectly stuck right in front of the EVF, I still kinda see what I’m doing, rather than having the edges of the image fleeing out of my sight. (And some of the displayed settings – speed, aperture and such – are written on the black margins, so they are interfering a bit less with the preview, without me needing to downright hide them via the 
button.)