While there is a time and a place for photos taken at a skewed angle, generally you want your photos to appear straight. There are a couple tools to help us take straight photos on the Canon 70D:
There are two settings that can be individually enabled to help us get those perfectly straight pictures: a grid display, and a live level. Each can be configured for both the viewfinder and the LCD monitor Live Display.
- To set up the Viewfinder grid display, open the first Camera Settings tab in the Settings menu. Open VF Grid Display and switch to Enable. Through the viewfinder, we now see the view split with two vertical and horizontal lines for a 3×3 grid, with additional guides on the left and right.
- Underneath VF Grid Display is Viewfinder Level. Setting this option to Show will display a live level line in the viewfinder, using the camera’s built-in accelerometer to determine tilt compared to flat ground. You will see a camera icon near the bottom of the view with two short lines on either side. These lines indicate how the camera is tilted. When the lines are horizontal, your camera is now very close to horizontal with the ground.
- Live View display has a couple additional options. To enable the grid display during Live View, open the Grid Display menu in the fifth tab of the Settings menu. Our options are Off, 3×3, 6×4, and 3×3+diag. The options show how many sections the display will be divided into, with the last option showing corner-to-corner diagonal lines as well.
- To view a live level on the Live View, press the INFO button until a circle with two lines across the middle is visible. The orange line will turn green when matched with the level line when the camera is very close to horizontal with the ground.
- This Live View display option (along with two of the other info views) can be disabled as well: in the fourth-to-last tab of the Settings menu (the third wrench icon) open the INFO button display options menu. From here, you can choose to turn on or off any of the three display options.
Check out our Canon 70D Tips & Tricks Roundup for more info!
