One of the features of the Canon 7D and some of the other prosumer EOS cameras often overlooked by photographers is the ability to register (or preset) camera user settings. This is an incredibly useful feature for nature photographers as it allows you to quickly recall several  camera functions at once from the exposure command dial.

We have all been caught taking a photo of a static object such as a plant or sleeping duck  where we use low ISOs for quality and small apertures for large DOF often with mirror lockup if the light conditions require slow shutter speeds,  with camera on tripod when a bird flies over. Though it is often possible to whip the camera off of the tripod quickly, the camera which was set to static mode shooting requires several changes to get it into "action\flight mode" and this would take tens of seconds normally.  With the camera registered user settings wholesale setup changes are much faster!
 

 
I have  "registered" the C1 setting to be my flight or action setting as it is easy to remember that  "one" is for action, while C2 is for Movie and C3 are for Macro\Static  shooting. The nice thing about the presets is that any and all functions can be overridden. For example if there is heavy overcast and I use  C1 which I have preset to ISO 320  which is a sunny day setting and may not give a correct exposure with the f-stop and shutter speed I choose to use, I simply set the ISO to 640 or higher.  ISO 640 will be retained until  C1 is deselected at which time it defaults to the 320 ISO setting. The same goes for shutter speed and aperture which I often change to compensate the exposure.

The only other important parameter that cannot be set for flight shooting is the lens focus limiter, I always use the far limit for flight. It would be very useful if Canon can make this possible from the presets in the future.

Your own settings may be different than mine depending on the type of photography you do.

Refer to page 223 in the EOS 7D manual for instructions on registering the functions.
 
 

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