From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Focusing in Live View

Focusing in Live View - 5D Tutorial

From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Focusing in Live View

When you activate live view, your camera raises its mirror out of the way, so that light can get all the way through the lens, and back to the sensor that's back here. It's the sensor that creates the image that's shown on the LCD screen, so no live view image can be created when the mirror is down, and in the way of the sensor. Unfortunately, there's something else that happens when the mirror flips up. The autofocus sensors in your camera are located up here in the camera's pentaprism. Light from the lens gets bounced up here, and the autofocus sensors analyze it to calculate focus. But when the mirror is flipped up, those sensors basically go blind, meaning your camera loses its normal autofocus capability. So when you're in live view, the camera has to use a different method to autofocus. By default, rather than relying on its autofocus sensors, the computer in your camera will analyze the image that the sensor is capturing, and focus accordingly. A practical upshot is that…

Contents