Millismote wrote:
I don't find a AEL button on the shoulder of my Canon M50. Could you provide a step by step procedure for setting up back button focus on the M50 please.
The AE Lock button is the * button.
This is the "old school" way of doing BBF on Canon cameras, on various models before they added the AF-On button to many of the DSLRs.
I don't have an M50 and their manual doesn't help.
I also don't have an M5 yet, but am planning to get one and the manual for it may help. Here's what the M5 manual shows:
Go into your menu, navigate to custom functions, then look under "other". There choose "assign button functions". This should give a display of the camera. If I understand it correctly, you can then navigate to EITHER the shutter release button OR the * button and click to enter that. Here I think you'll have four possible choices. The letters before the / in the option description indicate what the shutter button will do, while the letters after the / tell us what the * button will do.
1. AF/AE Lock.... Shutter button half press starts focus, meter & IS, full press releases shutter/* button provides AE Lock. (Default)
2. AE Lock/AF.... Shutter button half press starts meter, IS with AE Lock/* button starts & runs AF (set AF to AI Servo).
3. AF/AF Lock, no AE Lock... shutter button half press starts AF, meter & IS/* button provides AF Lock without AE Lock.
4. AE/AF, no AE Lock... shutter button half press starts meter & IS/* button starts & runs AF (set AF to AI Servo).
This sequence is a little different from what was on my older DSLRs and SLRs.
Option 1 is the default setup.
One choice that reassigns starting and running AF to the * button is
Option 2. This provides BBF, but IMO it's usually not a good idea to have AE Lock on every shot you take, which is what this option forces. In fact, in my experience AE Lock is a fairly rarely used feature... usually only helpful in certain situations.
Option 3 is actually sort of opposite of the way much BBF is done. With that setting, half press of the shutter release still starts AF, but AF is stopped and locked when the * button is pressed.
I used the equivalent of
Option 4. That entirely removes AF start & run from the shutter release button, reassigns that to the * button, so it's no longer available to set AE Lock. Instead of having to go into the menu and switch things around on the rare occasion when I wanted AE Lock, I simply made note of the exposure settings and switched to fully manual exposure mode, then set everything myself (including no Auto ISO... which wasn't even an option then). This gives the same effect as AE Lock.
You will probably find the same in your M50 menu. I hope so!