How to avoid mirror bounce on your Canon DSLR

If you’re consistently getting blurry shots, even when using a tripod, you are probably experiencing a common photography problem called mirror bounce.

Mirror bounce is caused by the mirror flipping up and unsettling the camera just as the shot is about to be taken. Any movement on the part of the camera will cause blurred results in macro shooting, especially when you’re not using the short pulse of light from a flash to freeze motion.

You’ll find that even if you use a remote controller to operate the camera, so that you’re not actually touching it, mirror-bounce will still degrade the sharpness of the results. Your Canon DSLR should feature a Mirror Lock-up facility to fix the problem. Here’s how they work on many current Canon DSLRs…

Avoid mirror bounce on Canon DSLRs

01 Mirror Lock Up
Current Canon DSLRs, apart from the Canon 1100D, have Mirror Lock-up in the Custom Functions menu. Set this to Enable, then do the following…

02 Self-timer
Select Self-timer with a two-sec delay. This gives the camera a chance to settle. You could also use Mirror Lock-up with a remote control.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 7:00 am and is filed under Canon D-SLR Skills, Photography Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.