Canon 7DII performing weirdly after resetting

Canon 7DII with Canon 100-400mm II
Canon batteries with at least 50 percent capacity
On tripd
SanDisk SD cards

I had been shooting wildlife all morning at a local-ish NWR and went over to the closed visitor's center to photograph song birds. Throughout the morning I was having no problems smashing the shutter to capture snow geese lifting off en masse.

At the songbird location, Decided to reset all settings to factory because I don't have a good grasp yet of all of the AF options by heart (will re-watch Canon and others AF instructions) and wanted to default back to center AF quickly without going through all the options.

Firmware is 1.04

After resetting:

Shooting RAW, using high speed continuous, the camera would go along for several frames, then, shut-down. The top LCD screen went blank.

I turned the camera off, then, on, and the problem returned. I did the on/off dance multiple times.

Appreciate pointers. Thanks
 

Rockskipper

Somewhere skipping rocks and taking photos
Apr 20, 2017
68
15
Was it very cold out? Did you take it home and try it with fully-charged batteries? The reset might have been just a coincidence or maybe used enough charge that it sent the batteries into weird mode. Cold batteries do strange things sometimes. But if you're in San Jose and it's warm, that's probably not it. I live in Colorado, so batteries are always my first concern in the winter and will sometimes act up even when they appear to be charged.
 
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Valvebounce

CR Pro
Apr 3, 2013
4,555
450
57
Isle of Wight
Hi Dave.
Power off and then remove the battery, wait a few seconds and then replace the battery and power on. Sometimes it takes more than just switching off, these things don’t actually fully power down just by switching off, for example switch off while looking through the viewfinder, keep looking for a few seconds then drop the battery out, keep watching and you will see the viewfinder darken significantly, the transmissive lcd (I think that is the correct name without looking it up) is just one of the things that don’t power down with the switch, neither does the gps if it is switched on.
If it is still messing about try doing the reset again.
Also note that there are two resets, a full reset and a custom function reset, a C.fn reset does not reset everything, some C.fn settings do not get reset, like custom button assignments.
I think you can set the joystick (it may be the default setting) so that pressing it in will take you back to the centre focus point.

Cheers, Graham.
 
Upvote 0
Was it very cold out? Did you take it home and try it with fully-charged batteries? The reset might have been just a coincidence or maybe used enough charge that it sent the batteries into weird mode. Cold batteries do strange things sometimes. But if you're in San Jose and it's warm, that's probably not it. I live in Colorado, so batteries are always my first concern in the winter and will sometimes act up even when they appear to be charged.

Was in Willows, CA, about 75 miles north of Sacramento. It was about 50 degrees.
 
Upvote 0
Hi Dave.
Power off and then remove the battery, wait a few seconds and then replace the battery and power on. Sometimes it takes more than just switching off, these things don’t actually fully power down just by switching off, for example switch off while looking through the viewfinder, keep looking for a few seconds then drop the battery out, keep watching and you will see the viewfinder darken significantly, the transmissive lcd (I think that is the correct name without looking it up) is just one of the things that don’t power down with the switch, neither does the gps if it is switched on.
If it is still messing about try doing the reset again.
Also note that there are two resets, a full reset and a custom function reset, a C.fn reset does not reset everything, some C.fn settings do not get reset, like custom button assignments.
I think you can set the joystick (it may be the default setting) so that pressing it in will take you back to the centre focus point.

Cheers, Graham.

It was a full reset. It may be the batteries. Even though it was about 50 degrees, the batteries are several years old, from my 60D and 6D. I have some spares and will try with full charge. Thanks
 
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