The Folks Who Make Your Photography Goals a Reality

I not too long ago returned from an unbelievable journey to Canon’s Tokyo headquarters and Utsunomiya lens manufacturing facility. While the sights and sounds of Tokyo and Utsunomiya are undoubtedly spectacular, and I’ll carry these recollections with me for the remainder of my life, it was the exceptionally uncommon peek backstage of Canon — one of the crucial fashionable and celebrated digital camera corporations — that made probably the most highly effective impression.

Every single side of a Canon digital camera and lens requires numerous folks working throughout many various groups. Each operate, massive and small, and each element in each digital camera and lens, requires dozens to tons of of individuals working 5 days per week for months and, in lots of instances, years. Some improvements take over a decade of labor behind the scenes to ever be carried out right into a challenge, and plenty of extra concepts by no means work in any respect.

Full disclosure: I used to be invited by Canon alongside a handful of my colleagues to go to Japan and achieve unprecedented entry to Canon Inc., the beating coronary heart of Canon’s world operations. Although Canon didn’t have editorial management over this story, nor did it require there be a narrative in any respect, it’s nonetheless price noting that Canon prolonged the preliminary invitation and paid for the journey.

With that necessary be aware out of the best way, let’s dive proper in and take an exceptionally uncommon peek backstage at Canon’s operations.

A Company of Passionate Photographers

As I entered Canon’s headquarters, I used to be instantly struck by the large dimension of Canon’s imaging division and its abundance of people who find themselves enthusiastic about pictures. Behind the ever-present Japanese company uniform of slacks, gown shirts, and jackets are people who find themselves deeply invested in pictures’s historical past, current, and future.

For instance, Canon’s Executive Vice President, Head of Imaging Group, and Chief Executive of Imaging Business Operations, Go Tokura, obtained his begin at Canon as a product designer. One of his earliest and, as it might prove, impactful initiatives in his early days was the Canon T90 in 1986. This digital camera would in the end affect the design of each Canon EOS digital camera that adopted.

He loves pictures, which has considerably knowledgeable his contributions at Canon from his early days to his present function close to the very high of Canon’s imaging operations. He nonetheless takes photos, as does practically each single particular person we talked to, each at Canon Inc. headquarters in Tokyo and the Utsunomiya manufacturing facility. Canon runs inside pictures competitions for its workers, and as you may think about, the competitors is stiff.

There can be a constant understanding all through Canon that pictures issues. The firm is probably finest identified for its skilled gear, however what arguably issues much more are the tens of millions of people that use Canon gear to doc their lives and all the dear moments therein.

Birthdays, first steps, graduations, and all of the on a regular basis joys dotted alongside the meandering paths and intersections in life are captured on cameras. There’s little doubt Canon would love for everybody to make use of its cameras, however the firm nonetheless understands that the very idea of pictures itself is eminently highly effective, no matter model.

Ultimately, earlier than any work on any digital camera or lens begins, the corporate’s love for pictures is a foundational important ingredient to its merchandise, from entry-level to skilled. There isn’t any Canon digital camera or lens with out this grounding precept: Work within the service of pictures.

The Canon Design Concept: Chasing Perfection Through Persistence

The core design of the Canon T90 that Mr. Tokura labored on has influenced practically each Canon EOS digital camera for nearly 40 years. The place of the shutter launch, the command dial association, and the general curves and aesthetic of lots of EOS cameras hint a transparent line again to the Nineteen Eighties.

To a cynic, this consistency could appear stale. However, the really feel of a digital camera is without doubt one of the most vital differentiators nowadays. Canon insists that it isn’t tethered to the previous and can by no means waver from altering issues even when it upsets the established order. However, there’s a delicate steadiness right here.

The refinements every mannequin brings, though not universally for the higher — sorry, EOS R Multi-function Bar — are very considerate. The prototyping course of is intensive, with Canon making fashions by hand and utilizing superior 3D printing to check the texture of every new product. The digital camera should match completely, and the buttons and dials should be within the optimum location for the goal consumer.

No element is just too small, both. Take the Canon EOS R1’s new grip design, for instance. When prototyping this, though it’s attainable to digitally place the sample onto the mould as information, Canon’s workforce intentionally selected to switch it utilizing conventional etching methods. Each sample placement is visually inspected and manually adjusted to make sure precision.

Another instance is the sample of every ring on Canon RF lenses. Zoom, focus, aperture, and management rings all have their very own fastidiously thought-about texture, permitting photographers to instantly know which dial they’re touching with out trying.

As Haruki Ota of the Canon Design Center explains, Canon employs a human-centric design philosophy. Cameras and lenses should at all times be comfy to carry and use. When designing for a various group of people that use their cameras in numerous methods for varied functions, that is an exceptionally difficult goal to hit.

Some of probably the most impactful design selections could come simply, whereas others require constant, common tinkering. In both case, whether or not it’s an clearly good concept or one which took intensive effort, the core half stays: simply as many individuals are concerned with what occurs contained in the digital camera, a major quantity are involved with the outside, and all of it issues significantly. The digital camera and lens are the instruments that photographers use to comprehend their artistic imaginative and prescient, whether or not it’s for enjoyable or to make a residing. When shaping instruments like that, each element is necessary.

Core Features and Functions

There is admittedly a sure satisfaction in utilizing a digital camera that requires effort to seize a superb shot, however Canon’s concentrate on making pictures extra accessible undoubtedly has broader attraction. From its picture stabilization know-how to more moderen AI-powered picture processing, the corporate is dedicated to creating it simpler for extra folks to seize the picture they envisioned once they pressed the shutter.

Dual Pixel CMOS AF

Many latest developments in digital camera know-how concentrate on making it simpler to seize the specified picture, with a major a part of that effort coming from autofocus know-how.

Back within the movie SLR and later digital SLR days, autofocus know-how was comparatively archaic. We have gone from a handful of closely centralized autofocus factors to 1000’s arrayed throughout all the picture space. Cameras have advanced from sluggish, pulsing autofocus to lightning-quick focus that locks onto a topic so rapidly it feels just like the digital camera has learn your thoughts.

Although a photographer’s abilities and experience nonetheless matter and make capturing a superb, sharp picture simpler, autofocus know-how in trendy Canon cameras is so good that it will probably typically really feel like dishonest. These enhancements are hard-earned and require fixed, devoted work.

One of probably the most attention-grabbing stops on our tour at Canon’s headquarters in Tokyo was in a protracted hallway-like room tucked away in an auxiliary constructing. Here, an in depth motorized monitor launches a topic towards a digital camera, and Canon’s engineers have full management over the lighting and velocity, making certain they’ll check autofocus efficiency with fastidiously chosen parameters.

During one demo, Canon technicians launched a photograph of a lion towards the digital camera. I imply launched. If it have been an actual lion, and I used to be behind that digital camera, I’d be satisfied I used to be a split-second from a horrific dying. The digital camera stayed locked onto the attention within the print, even when a Canon worker dimmed the lights to imitate daybreak and nightfall circumstances.

Another demonstration centered on the Action Priority autofocus within the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and EOS R1. This mode at the moment works for soccer, basketball, and volleyball, making it simpler to seize sharp pictures of high-tempo, thrilling occasions in every sport, like a header in soccer or a spike on the internet in volleyball.

Building these modes requires intensive subject testing and real-world work from many photographers, together with professionals introduced in by Canon to assist check new modes and merchandise. Canon stated in the course of the presentation that it captured tons of of 1000’s of photographs of every sport to develop the Action Priority characteristic. That’s plenty of kicks, dunks, and spikes — and a staggering period of time. And in the end, most EOS R5 Mark II house owners won’t ever {photograph} these sports activities at knowledgeable degree, however that granular work ensures that for individuals who do, they nail the shot practically each time.

While the demonstrations have been spectacular in and of themselves, what impressed me most was that this efficiency resulted from years of evolution throughout many features of the digital camera. These features embrace the picture sensor itself, meticulously coded algorithms, improved processors, and the motors contained in the telephoto lens connected to the digital camera. Every incremental enchancment is constructed on a long time of labor by numerous folks.

Koichi Fukuda, Canon’s high engineer and Senior Principal Engineer of the IMG Development Unit, defined that Canon’s celebrated Dual Pixel AF focuses on three key areas: intelligence, velocity, and precision. The firm’s Dual Pixel AF allows developments in all three areas and is considered one of Canon’s most distinct technological benefits over its friends.

Many features of contemporary Canon EOS R mirrorless cameras are leaps and bounds higher than these in earlier generations, however maybe no single space of progress has remodeled the best way photographers take photos greater than autofocus.

Image Processing

Another space of serious focus is picture processing. We’ve already mentioned how improved processing impacts issues like autofocus, but it surely additionally impacts picture high quality.

As Kenji Takahashi from Canon’s IMG Development Unit defined, a major space of focus for Canon’s picture processing engineers is to work diligently to assist photographers seize the photographs that they think about once they press the shutter. There’s plenty of work that goes on behind the scenes contained in the digital camera to make delicate, primarily imperceptible modifications to how the digital camera renders colours and selects the suitable white steadiness when utilizing AWB, which most photographers make the most of, particularly once they seize RAW photos.


Recent developments utilizing deep studying assist trendy Canon cameras detect the topic and lighting circumstances to enhance automated white steadiness. For instance, take into account scenes with blue skies. In these instances, if the digital camera tries to pick out a white steadiness to steadiness all the scene, the blue sky will seem pale and fewer saturated, and non-sky areas will seem disproportionately heat. So due to deep studying, Canon’s AWB system can ignore the blue sky when deciding on the proper white steadiness for a posh scene.

Similarly, deep studying can be used to detect plant areas in photographs. Rather than steadiness all the scene, together with inexperienced vegetation, the digital camera can acknowledge that the inexperienced is really meant to be inexperienced and isn’t excessively tinted.

It’s additionally attainable to pick out the proper white steadiness whereas making an allowance for folks within the body. This is particularly necessary when capturing portraits, as typically the “best” white steadiness setting for the general scene can result in inaccurate pores and skin tones, which is, after all, not the specified end result when photographing folks.

As of now, all these deep learning-based space detection options are solely in Canon’s most superior cameras, together with the latest EOS R1 and R5 Mark II fashions. However, face-area detection has been utilized in lots of Canon cameras for effectively over a decade.

Recent developments in picture processing concentrate on enhancing sharpness and decreasing noise. Canon’s optical engineers work exceptionally exhausting to get the very best picture high quality. However, when mixed with software program, it’s attainable to attain even higher outcomes. Canon’s picture processing engineers work on constructing impartial community lens optimizers, that are skilled utilizing many photographs captured with varied lenses to exactly appropriate for varied aberrations, together with diffraction.

This is an space the place, maybe greater than another, Canon combines its bodily digital camera and lens know-how with groundbreaking AI to assist photographers notice their imaginative and prescient with out ever compromising their artistic imaginative and prescient. After all, it’s one factor to enhance picture high quality and digital camera efficiency utilizing AI, however one other matter altogether to basically change how a digital camera captures a scene.

Reliability: Canon Breaks Its Cameras So Hopefully You Won’t

An interesting (and briefly uncomfortable cease) on the Canon headquarters tour took us to the corporate’s reliability and digital camera testing facility. Here, Yoshiyuki Kaizu confirmed how Canon exams the ruggedness of its cameras. Professionals want their cameras and lenses to work as anticipated on a regular basis, not simply when circumstances are comfy.

We went into Canon’s climate-controlled testing rooms. One has temperatures effectively at round 120°F, the humidity feels prefer it’s at 100%, which proved considerably extra uncomfortable for me than for Canon’s skilled digital camera gear. The subsequent cease was a subzero room, which, after the horrors of the moist, sizzling room, felt downright refreshing. For a minute, at the least, after which it was excruciating.

In excessive environments, which go far past the standard circumstances most photographers will ever encounter, engineers check digital camera responsiveness, picture sensor efficiency, and dealing with. While I wouldn’t need to spend a lot time in both room, the cameras didn’t skip a beat.

A extra widespread state of affairs for photographers is dropping their digital camera, and Canon focuses extensively on this as effectively. We noticed Canon’s drop and affect testing machines, and fairly frankly, it was powerful to observe Canon cameras and lenses being violently shaken and dropped. Having dropped some gear over time, together with a dreaded tripod fall on a mountainside a few years in the past, I’m grateful for the folks at picture corporations who work day in and time out to make gear extra sturdy, even when some cameras in a lab must pay the worth.

No picture gear can survive each fall; it’s simply not a sensible or achievable aim. However, for Kaizu’s workforce, the aim is to do all the things attainable to make sure that as few photographers as attainable break their gear. That additionally consists of engineering the very best bins and packaging for delivery gear to distributors and prospects. Having seen how main delivery corporations deal with bins, this is perhaps probably the most crucial reliability work of all.

A Camera’s Glass Eye: The Lenses

While cameras are, after all, important to the image-making course of, so too are the lenses. Many photographers are extra excited by new digital camera fashions, however these after my very own coronary heart go wild for glass. The digital camera captures the important mild, however that mild would by no means get there with out the lens. An immense quantity of labor goes into designing and shaping glass in order that lenses focus mild optimally earlier than it strikes the picture sensor.

Optical Advancements Years within the Making Are Still Crafted by Hand

Glass know-how has come a good distance lately, particularly in terms of molding bizarre and wild aspherical lenses. While machines form a few of these advanced components, probably the most subtle of all are hand-ground by Canon’s most gifted artisans: Takumi.

These veteran craftsmen and craftswomen prepare for a few years, and in the event that they attain the extent of grasp, or “Meister,” they even earn particular badges on their uniforms. The ultra-high precision elements that the Takumi make by hand are important for Canon’s finest lenses, together with maybe the corporate’s most spectacular telephoto zoom lens ever, the RF100-300mm F2.8 L IS USM.

It is hanging that in an trade the place so many issues are made by machines — I did additionally see robots assembling lenses, by the best way — there are nonetheless important items of glass which can be fashioned by the weathered palms of grasp artisans. Canon states that human palms are nonetheless way more delicate and exact than any machine, and when engaged on lenses requiring nanometer-level precision, the human contact is irreplaceable.

While the optical designs should still be engineered on computer systems by good mathematical minds, lots of Canon’s finest lenses nonetheless rely closely on analog, human contact, and Canon believes this will likely at all times be true. The firm is coaching new generations of Takumi on a regular basis.

Optical Specialties

At Canon’s Utsunomiya manufacturing facility, I noticed two very totally different sides of the identical “optical technologies” coin. On the one hand, Canon engineers work diligently to develop electrical and mechanical applied sciences to enhance a lens’s stabilization and autofocus. On the opposite hand, optical physics nonetheless rule the day. However, for photographers, each these very several types of engineering should come collectively and work in good concord. You want distinctive glass for photographs to be sharp and freed from aberrations. But you want the electronics and mechanics to drive the autofocus, hold all the things secure, and encase the delicate glass in a approach that’s helpful.

While Canon has made numerous optical and mechanical developments for its EF and now RF glass over the a long time, maybe probably the most spectacular is the corporate’s BR optical components. These glass components, a decade within the making, incorporate anomalous dispersion traits that change how blue mild is refracted contained in the lens. The BR component is super-thin, barely perceptible. However, this ultra-thin component, sandwiched between concave and convex components, modifications how blue wavelengths of sunshine concentrate on the picture sensor.

Compared to conventional components, BR optics assist blue mild focus on the similar actual location as purple and inexperienced mild. This means considerably diminished longitudinal chromatic aberrations (LoCA). Canon is adamant that no different firm has know-how nearly as good as its BR lens.

The firm is equally pleased with its SWC and ASC optics that cut back ghosting and flare. SWC, or subwavelength construction coating, places 300nm wedge shapes on the floor of the glass to cut back inside reflections.

Lens Autofocus

On the mechanical facet, it’s not possible to thoroughly separate enhancements in lens autofocus motors from higher AF techniques inside cameras, however there is no such thing as a doubting the affect that quicker and extra highly effective autofocus motors in lenses have on general efficiency.

Within Canon’s RF lens lineup, there are 5 kinds of actuators used to drive autofocus, every with distinct benefits. The Nano USM motor, maybe probably the most spectacular of the bunch, is tiny, quiet, and fast. It is utilized in {many professional} Canon zoom lenses.

The excessive thrust VCM is swift, too, and utilized in Canon’s sequence of 5 hybrid prime lenses, together with the brand new RF 85mm f/1.4L VCM.

Then there’s the lead screw sort STM system, which is compact and quiet, too. This is finest utilized in compact, light-weight lenses just like the RF 10-20mm f/4L IS STM ultra-wide zoom lens.

The gear sort STM is a little more old-school, but it surely nonetheless has a spot in trendy RF lenses as a result of it presents good thrust at an affordable price. It is utilized in prime lenses just like the RF 28mm f/2.8 STM.

Finally, rounding out the listing is Canon’s ring USM autofocus system. This is a high-speed, high-thrust autofocus system used within the firm’s super-telephoto lenses just like the RF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM. When energy is the precedence, that is the choose.

It ought to maybe go with out saying by this level, however there are a lot of folks behind every of those autofocus actuators, and Canon is consistently exploring new choices.

How Canon’s Culture Connects With Japan

Alongside the insightful excursions and shows at Canon HQ in Tokyo and the Utsunomiya manufacturing facility, Canon additionally went above and past to share Japanese tradition with us.

This was a major focus all through the week, and included native delicacies, an exquisite day in Kyoto, and even sumo wrestling. While clearly Canon needed to point out its visitors a superb time, the will everybody needed to showcase Japanese tradition, historical past, and customs with us was clearly honest. Some of our experiences have been captured in our RF 85mm f/1.4L VCM Review, which we shot in Japan utilizing Canon’s broader sequence of VCM hybrid lenses.

Canon’s merchandise and applied sciences are not possible to separate from the place they’re made, and are deeply linked to the individuals who make them. While new cameras and lenses are thrilling to photographers like me, they arrive and go over time. The individuals who work on Canon pictures gear persist by way of all of the technological evolution and picture trade upheaval. Ultimately, greater than the rest, the folks will even be what I keep in mind and worth most from my time in Tokyo visiting Canon. Photography is in the end not about megapixels, however about connections.

There Are No Small Parts When It Comes to Making Your Photos a Reality

While every Canon imaging know-how I realized about in larger element from the folks behind it was fascinating, I used to be most struck by the variety of folks concerned. Canon explains that considered one of its greatest strengths is the in-house growth of a lot of its know-how, and that depends on an unlimited variety of folks.

Every photographer has had the expertise of opening up a brand new or new-to-them digital camera for the primary time. It’s a magical feeling as a result of cameras are greater than simply cameras. They’re how we seize life, take pleasure in our free time, or, for the particularly lucky and expert, put meals on the desk.

But what many photographers, myself included, not often take into consideration are the folks alongside the best way who make your digital camera. I don’t simply imply the tons of of individuals throughout dozens of groups who developed or manufactured a particular digital camera mannequin, however the 1000’s extra who got here earlier than them whose work echoes by way of the a long time. That applies equally to lenses, and maybe even extra so as a result of robust, dependable optical foundations have existed far longer than digital pictures was even a twinkle in anybody’s eye.

Thanks to my experiences at Canon’s Tokyo headquarters and its lens manufacturing facility in Utsunomiya, each time I press the shutter on my digital camera, I might be cognizant of the truth that many proficient, passionate folks poured years of exhausting work into it. While trendy mirrorless cameras are subtle digital machines, they’re nonetheless in the end made by individuals who, in lots of instances, love pictures simply as a lot as you or I do.

Image credit: Chris Niccolls, Jeremy Gray, Jaron Schneider, and Canon