Why is my Canon 7d mark ii taking such dark pictures even though my settings should be correct?

Question

I'm new here and am having what feels like a crisis with my Canon 7d mark ii camera. I've had this camera for about 4 years, so I feel as though I know it relatively well. The past few weeks I've noticed that my photos are suddenly appearing super dark. I don't think I have bumped something on my settings or changed one of my settings without realizing it. My camera never had a hard time handling animal photography in broad daylight and now it can't even properly capture a tree on a sunny day. I had to crank my iso up to 2500 and set shutter speed to 1/20 just to photograph my dog laying in the grass. Normally, my iso might be 250 and maybe 1/500 depending on what I'm doing. I don't think it's an issue with my lenses since the couple I tried seem to have no effect on the discouragingly dark pictures.
It just doesn't seem right that my photos are turning out so dark when it has not been like this before. Could it be something with my aperture or there's something wrong with the programming inside my camera? I feel clueless. This past week, my camera went in for a cleaning, but it was acting weird beforehand so I don't think it's anything the camera cleaning guy did.
Has this happened to anyone before or does anyone have any helpful insight?
Thank you in advance!
Below are pictures I took in attempt to figure what the problem is. It was a bright, sunny day, so my settings would normally be around iso 250 and 1/500 (I hope that is not majorly wrong). Both pictures were taken with settings around there and are not normally that dark. I believe I normally shoot in evaluative metering, I do not think I accidentally changed that. I do not think I bumped something with my exposure, either. I honestly do not change much on my camera because I figured out where I like to manually shoot and fear changing something.

John Sumner · Answer

This is not a difinitive answer to your question but may be a starting point for investigation. I copied your images to my computer and easily adjusted them to look more correctly exposed so the correct data should be already there. (My apologies if this seems a bit obvious or if you have already tried it but your description gives the impression that you are not really sure what settings you have used for those pictures.) May I suggest you take a picture with your manual settings and then take the same shot with the camera set to an auto mode that locks in the same ISO setting. Compare the two shots by comparing the aperture and shutter speed settings chosen by the camera with those chosen by you.
If the images are both under exposed but have very different settings it may be time to seek help from a Canon service agent.

Let us know what you discover.

Michael C · Answer

Based on your report that the camera had recently been returned to you after a clean and check along with your discovery that the aperture was set to f/25, here's what most likely happened:
Your cleaning technician probably manually set the aperture to f/25 when checking for dust spots on your camera's sensor. It's easier to see the effect of dust in front of the sensor when narrow apertures (high f-numbers) are used.
This would also assume that the camera was placed into manual exposure mode so that aperture (Av), exposure time (Tv), and ISO could be set manually by the technician. If you normally shoot using a different exposure mode, you need to set the mode dial back to where you normally use it and check again that all three exposure variables are where you want them based on the metering mode you want to use.

Why is my Canon 7d mark ii taking such dark pictures even though my settings should be correct?

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