10 Cool Features on the Canon EOS Rebel SL1/100D

The Canon EOS Rebel SL1/100D is packed with many great features, more than you might think. Here are the ten coolest features a camera has to offer.

New scene modes
The camera comes with a lot of scene modes. If you have owned a Canon Point and Shoot camera before, then you are familiar with the Sports and Portrait modes. But this camera has some new and exciting modes that are specifically designed to take pictures of very specific subjects. The new scene modes on the camera are:

• Candlelight: This is the scene mode to use when you want to create candlelit selfies of your significant other, your child, or the aspiring model who lives nearby.

 

• Kids: This scene mode enables you to create compelling pictures of your kids while they are playing. With this mode, the camera continuously focuses while your child moves toward or away from the camera, ensuring that you get a shot that is in focus. The default driving mode is continuous, which means the camera will shoot up to four frames per second for as long as you hold the shutter button down, making it easier for you to capture an action sequence of your child while they are playing.

 

• Food: If you or someone in your family is a gourmet, setting up a food scene is your recipe for creating compelling food images. This mode makes your food photos look good enough to eat by creating bright photos with vivid colors.

Edit photos in the camera
Even if you have photo editing software on your computer, there may be times when your computer is not with you, such as when you are on vacation, and you want to do some editing before downloading photos to someone else’s computer to share with others. Here are two adjustments you can make in the camera:

• Crop Images: When you crop a photo, you can remove unwanted elements like trash, utility poles, or anything else that detracts from the photo. When you crop photos in the camera, you save the cropped photo, which means the original is still safe and sound if you want to make more edits when you’re with your photo editing software again.

 

• Resize Images: This option is useful when you need a smaller image to attach to an email message. You can resize a JPEG image to any of the available default sizes.

Touch screen
If you have a touch screen device like an iPhone or iPad, you’ll be glad to know that the camera comes with a touch screen that you can use to enable menu commands, review photos, and more. Just like any device with a touch screen, you can tap, swipe and swipe in/out to navigate your way through the menus and screens.

Live view and touch shutter
With Live View enabled, you can compose your photos with the camera’s LCD screen, which has a lot more real estate than a small viewfinder screen. In addition to configuring your images on the screen, you can enable the Live View Quick Control menu, which allows you to change settings by touching the screen. You can also enable Touch Shutter through the Live View Quick Control menu, which enables you to achieve focus and take a photo with the touch of a finger on the LCD screen.

HD video
Whether you’re a soccer mom who wants to capture video of your kids, or you’re an aspiring independent filmmaker who wants to get rid of Frederico Fettuccini, your camera has the tools you need to create high definition (HD) video. And it’s not the light 720p HD video that you find in camcorders. It’s a beautiful cinematic 1080p HD video, otherwise known as Full HD, with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. All you need to add is some creativity and imagination.

Video clips and albums
The video is great, but if you’ve never made a video before, you should know that to get a crisp and clear video, you need to edit it to remove bogus and other errors. You can edit the video that you download to your computer in an app like Adobe Premiere Elements, which requires a monetary investment and flattening the learning curve. If you don’t feel like walking in the water in a video-editing software suite, you can dip your toe into the shallow end by creating camcorder video footage that gets collected into in-camera albums. Video snapshots are small snippets of places you visit or people you know. The snippets are 2-8 seconds long, and compiled into a video album. After you create a video album, you can delete the snapshots or change the playback order of the clips in the albums. And all this editing is done with the camera. After setting the video album, you can save it and then download it to your computer.

Creative filters
If you have a photo editing app like Photoshop Elements, you can buy filters to add special effects to your photos or change them to black and white. These filters are quite expensive, so you will be glad to know that you can apply special effects to your photos in camera with Creative Filters. With Creative Filters, you can create photos that look like watercolor paintings, black and white photos, soft focus photos, and more.

External Speedlites
The camera comes with a small pop-up flash that can help illuminate the scene. However, when using the pop-up flash, you run the risk of creating images of people with red eyes and dark backgrounds. Fortunately, the camera is equipped with a quick-connect port where you can insert a much more powerful external flash unit, which on Canon-talk is known as a Speedlite. Speedlites are more powerful, and you can use camera menu commands to control them.

Professional shooting modes
If you are an experienced photographer, you know that your Rebel SL1 / EOS 100D comes with shooting modes found in professional dSLRs. If you’re not an experienced photographer, aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual mode may be Greek for you. However, these modes are not as daunting as they might seem. You can use aperture priority mode (Av on the camera’s mode dial) when shooting portraits or landscapes. Yes, there is a portrait and landscape scene mode, but when you master the aperture priority mode, you have more control over what is in focus and what is not. Shutter priority mode (TV on camera mode dial) is used when shooting moving subjects. Sure, there’s a sports scene mode, but then again, you have more control over how you shoot a moving object when you’ve mastered shutter priority mode.

Sensor cleaning
The camera automatically cleans the sensor when the camera is turned on or off. It does this by shaking the sensor, which in theory removes any dust that might have stuck to the sensor when changing lenses. You can also clean the sensor manually by using the menu command. This keeps your photos clean. Without cleaning the sensor, you’ll end up with tiny black dots on your photos, unless you never change the lenses (which kind of goes against the purpose of a DSLR).