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Canon EOS M100 shooting experience and gallery

10/29/2017

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Canon EOS M100 shooting experience and gallery

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Washington State is known as the Evergreen State, a slogan that is emblazoned on automotive license plates from Seattle to Spokane. New York is the Empire State. Montana is Big Sky Country, and Florida is the Sunshine State.

What about Idaho? Famous Potatoes.

Seems to me there's a lot more to Idaho than just potatoes. Processed and cropped to taste in Adobe Camera Raw using the Camera Landscape color profile. Great exposure in full automatic mode.
ISO 200 | 1/250 sec | F2.8

While on a recent road trip through Idaho, this topic of state slogans came up with a few traveling companions who happen to live in state capital, Boise. In all fairness, it does look like there is an updated slogan. "Great Potatoes. Tasty Destinations." Eh. Somehow, it still fails to capture any sense of the awesome beauty that I experienced on my first trip through the north-western part of the state, along the Snake River and Hells Canyon and through the Clearwater Mountains.

The primary reason for this trip was to get some more shooting time in with the Canon EOS 6D Mark II. But I also threw the new, beginner-friendly Canon EOS M100 with the 22mm F2 pancake prime into my jacket pocket for capturing some of the lighter moments on the trip.

And given just how much of a thing I have for large-sensor compact cameras with prime lenses, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that I really, really enjoyed it.

What Canon got right

Not a bad parking spot. Processed to taste in Adobe Camera Raw using the Camera Neutral profile.
ISO 100 | 1/250 sec | F5.6

The most important thing that Canon got right with this camera is that it's just fun to use. With a good full Auto mode, and an easy switch over to Program Auto or Aperture Priority, it was easy to just yank the M100 out of my pocket, take a quick shot, and put it back in at a moment's notice. This was especially handy on, say, the top of a mountain with failing post-sunset light.

Despite the fairly serious guts in the M100, which include Canon's newest 24MP APS-C sensor and Digic 7 processor, the M100 doesn't feel like too 'serious' a camera to use. While it sometimes seemed overkill to take out the 6D II for some photos of late-night photo editing or a trip to the pool hall, the EOS M100 just seems made for such photographic opportunities.

Image processed to taste in-camera using tuned monochrome settings, with increased sharpening and contrast - still another good exposure from full Auto mode.
ISO 6400 | 1/40 sec | F2.8

It's also true that default sharpening and noise reduction values aren't really our favorites on Canon's recent cameras, but if your main purpose is getting better photos than what your cellphone can capture and then uploading to Instagram, it doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. Speaking of cellphones, the built-in NFC on the M100 (which the older M10 also has) makes pairing with Android phones an absolute breeze.

And if you find yourself needing to tweak your images, the M100 is one of the few entry-level Canon cameras that allows for in-camera Raw processing, which is a really nice touch. It also makes it easier to find your preferred settings.

The tilting touchscreen combines with the excellent Dual Pixel AF to make shooting from the hip a really addictive experience.

Smartphone cameras are steadily improving, but there's no way my phone could handle this sort of thing. Processed and cropped to taste in Adobe Camera Raw.
ISO 2000 | 1/60 sec | F2

Things to consider

Of course, there's also a couple things Canon could improve. I mean, look at this USB port. Just look at it.

What's wrong with this picture?

First off, that's a mini USB port, not the far more common micro USB port, so good luck finding a cable should you need to transfer over USB. The bigger issue is that the USB port included on the M100 does not support USB charging – something that's also true of Canon's EOS M5 and M6.

These cameras, particularly the tiny M100, practically beg to be travel cameras, at least with the pancake prime. Even if I'm traveling ultra-light, I'll need a charger for my phone, and being able to share that between the phone and camera means one less power brick to lose. Plus, if I do lose it, a generic USB charger is damned near ubiquitous compared with something that works specifically with Canon's LP-E12 batteries. And if you already have a bigger Canon kit with its own chargers, do you really want to carry another dedicated charger?

Besides that, I do wish that the M100 came with the M6's screen mechanism. The fact that the screen only flips up makes shooting top-down difficult, but it's better than a screen that doesn't tilt at all, particularly given the M100 lacks a viewfinder. Of course, a more complex screen mechanism would likely mean a bigger physical size, so there's no free lunch here, I suppose.

Tilt-up screens - great for low angles with pets and kids, lousy for high angles of whatever it is you might be eating. Out-of-camera JPEG in auto mode, cropped to taste.
ISO 200 | 1/250 sec | F5

Lastly, there's no getting around the limited native lens ecosystem for Canon's EF-M mount. Seriously, I love the 22mm F2, but it's the only compact, fast prime they've released in five years. The 35mm macro option is great to have, and the 11-22mm wide-angle is of high-quality, but is it too much to ask for a native fast 50mm equivalent? Given the system's size, packing an extra lens or two isn't going to be too much of a stretch for people who are into photography, but there just aren't great options out there right now.

The wrap

This Idaho roadtrip got me thinking. We did, of course, do a lot of serious photography with the Canon EOS 6D Mark II, including some portraits with Canon's gorgeous new 85mm F1.4L IS as well as some off-road action with something called an RZR. For the more serious stuff, the 6D Mark II was far and away the better tool.

But after a full day of shooting, when I'd stumble across some nice light or a casual moment I wanted to capture, I found that having the M100 in my pocket was a godsend, especially if it was my main option while the 6D II's batteries were charging, or files were backing up, or I simply didn't want to carry a full-frame DSLR with me out to dinner.

The EOS M100 was great for when I wanted to unwind from using a full-frame DSLR all day, but still have the capability to snag some nice photos. Out-of-camera JPEG.
ISO 4000 | 1/60 sec | F2

For the serious photographer, the M100 doesn't make much of a case for itself as that user's only camera. But for someone looking for a fun second camera, or a smartphone user looking to get into more serious photography with an excellent and easy-to-use touchscreen interface (i.e. the camera's intended audience), the EOS M100 – with its updated sensor, processor and autofocus system – is definitely worth a look.

Sample gallery

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October 29, 2017 at 08:00AM

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When Malcolm Gladwell wrote his book, “Outliers“, he had a chapter devoted to the “10,000 hours” rule that intimated that it took 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something.

I think this single criterion has been mild to totally debunked already, and he has said that most who quote that are doing so out of the real context of it, but he was clearly making a statement regarding the absolute importance of practicing one’s skill.

What was fundamentally lacking in the oft-quoted “10,000 hours to achieve mastery” was the unforgiving truth that if you practice something incorrectly for 10,000 hours you will be a master at doing it incorrectly.

Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, it makes it automatic. Automatically playing it wrong will not be a triumph if you are working on a Beethoven Sonata, it will make it nearly impossible to correct it without a struggle.

Perfect practice makes perfect is the best way of thinking of the often stated meme. But what does “perfect practice” mean?

To do something well, I believe we need to concentrate on three different aspects of learning how to do it. The mechanics of it, the reason for it, and the personal execution of it.

The mechanics are lighting and exposure and composition and… you get the idea. How the camera, sensor, lenses work together to form an image in the technical iteration. A capture. A shot.

This can take the form of trial and error, self-study, workshops, practice, and, well, schools. (I am actually very unexcited about “schools” at this point.)

The problem with only trial and error and self-study is that we may not learn the optimum way of doing something, and this can land us into the “practice it wrong” for 10,000 hours camp. Not a good place to be. Working with learning technical stuff means getting feedback on the technical stuff.

Find a mentor, a group, a select tribe of photographers that can look at what you did technically and make some suggestions. If it is not sharp, they can help you understand what may be going wrong.

Many times this takes the photographer to a place of self-measurement. In order to know if it is working for them, they will compare their work with the work of an established photographer already found to be excellent. Want to learn large format black and white landscape? Perhaps studying the work of Ansel Adams, John Paul Caponigro, or John Sexton may help you find your technical ‘base point’.

Once we have found it possible to make a ‘good quality’ image, we begin to be more selective in what we shoot since we are now looking for the reason to shoot it. This is the part of the process where we narrow our vision down a bit from shooting everything we see to making choices about subject matter, genre, and our personal style.

This is usually a longer process than the first. Building the body of work without a full reference of our own work means that we may have influences that are heavily invading our work. It can be derivative, similar, and in some ways a natural copy of those photographers we studied heavily in the first phase of the process.

We measure our work against others for style and resonance. Does it have the same tonal quality as so-and-so? Does it look too much like her work or is it more of a collection of watered down copies of that other guy’s work? The struggle is real. In photography, it can become extremely easy to copy a technique, style, and genre approach. Too easy, but that will not change at this point.

Our next phase is when we get personally frustrated by making photographs that are derivative or copies and we start to stretch for our own vision. A style that ties all of our work together – and while technique and reason are always a hugely important part of it, the reality is that this last phase is all about choices.

The technique we have down. The subject matter we know. The presentation is second nature… NOW we have to use all we know to begin to develop a body of work that makes all of the images tie together into our own vision.

Some photographers think I mean that your work has to be 100% unique, and that is not it at all. It has to be 100% authentically YOU. If your work resembles someone else’s work, but it 100% authentically yours, that is fine. There are many landscape shooters who have the same subject and similar style… but many of them will approach the same subject with a slightly different perspective, or point of view.

The similarities are not important, the difference is.

You have heard me quote the great jazz trumpet player Clark Terry before:

“Imitate. Assimilate. Innovate.”

The three parts of the process synthesized down into three simple words. However, each word is nearly a book into itself on the process of learning an art.

How many hours will it take? I don’t know. You don’t know, nor should you think about it in that macro-managed sort of way. To do so puts a hierarchy on the irrelevant aspect of time. It is not about the hours… it’s not about the number of photographs you take.

It is about the process… and these processes can take different amounts of time for different people. Some will find the technical part to be a piece of cake while others will struggle with it. The technical strugglers may find the second part of the process – assimilate – to be easy while the tech-minded struggle.

You are you. You are uniquely you. Your approach will be done the way you want it to be done.

And to add to the fun… heh… much of these different phases overlap each other. We are constantly working on technical even as we are producing a unique body of work in our own style.

Do not worry about the 10,000 hours or 10,000 photo rules. They aren’t rules, but more a set of guidelines to remind you that nothing will make you better than a focus on doing the work, having the work evaluated, and doing more work.

About the Author

Don Giannatti is a photographer, writer, and avid motorcyclist. Currently, he is working with a wonderful group of students at Project 52 Pro System, and helping them transition into full or part-time commercial photography. He has owned studios in Phoenix, LA, Chicago, and New York. He has been a guest instructor on CreativeLive, and he is busy writing a book of images and fiction from this past summer’s motorcycle ride through the smoke of the wildfires out west.