Well the day finally came. Canon’s most anticipated professional lens is making its way into public hands and I was able to get one of the first few that landed in Canada. As I say in the video, every photographer should get the opportunity to experience the excitement of unwrapping one of Canon’s “Big Whites”. Gear porn? Yes indeed, but i know some of you love these kinds of videos. Now time to go and shoot! Buy your own Canon 200-400
I ordered the Canon 200-400 F4 L IS the minute it was finally announced and as soon as my local store confirmed that it would be arriving in just a couple of weeks I set about grabbing a few necessary accessories for it. Since it’s a $12,000 lens I don’t mind spending a few more dollars on a couple of things to protect it and ease its operations. Let’s take a look at what is available for this exciting new lens: Really Right Stuff LCF-53 This is a replacement foot for the lens that included the Arca Swiss standard dovetail …
I’m a big fan of the original Canon 300mm f2.8 L IS, it has served me well from covers to ads I’ve packed this thing around the world with me shooting up mountains and around race tracks with frankly stunning results. I’ve never once caught myself wishing for anything more from the lens, I even shoot it regularly with extenders and produce more than useable images. When Canon announced its replacement last year I wondered how much of an improvement they could really make. In reading the various press releases for all of Canon’s new Super Telephotos it became clear …
This lens has been a long time coming as it was originally announced back in February but faced many unspecified delays on the way to dealers. I just received mine this morning, one from the first small batch that made it to Canada. I plan to do a proper review within the next week or so once I’ve had some more time with it but being one of Canon’s most anticipated lenses ever, I also wanted to post some first impressions and a couple of samples that I shot this afternoon. I performed all my initial tests with the lens …
The Rokinon 14mm f2.8 is the same lens as the Samyang, Bower and Pro Optic 14mm f2.8 and is currently the cheapest way to get into the ultra-wide lens game for Canon and Nikon cameras. The kind folks at B&H Photo lent me this lens for a couple of weeks to make some evaluations and I’ll be discussing the Canon EF mount version here, though I expect all conclusions to hold true for the various other mounts that are also available. First Impressions I’ve made a quick video hereto show the lens in my hands. I think it’s a useful …
I’ll admit to being a bit of a Canon lens snob, it’s fairly obvious if you look down my gear list anyway. In my career I’ve only owned one non-Canon lens and that was a Sigma 15mm Fisheye. The Tamron lens caught my eye, and the eyes of many others because it is the first (and still only) 24-70 f2.8 lens to feature image stabilization or Vibration Compensation as Tamron call it. Canon’s original 24-70 did not include it, in fact that lens may even have pre-dated the invention of it, but many people assumed that it would feature in …
Just a few days ago I took delivery of this exciting new lens. I posted an article outlining some initial impressions which I’m sure many of you have read. If you haven’t read it then be sure to watch the short video below which gives you an excellent idea of the size of the lens in my hands. I’ve now had a short time to take some simple images with it and draw some conclusions. I went up to London to find a few subjects that could test the usual things like sharpness, vignetting and chromatic aberration. Unfortunately the weather …
I’m away in Europe at the moment and I got word that a store in the UK had the new 40mm f2.8 Pancake lens. I’m pretty excited about this lens since I’m always trying to shave some weight off the gear that I carry and I’ve never been satisfied with ANY of Canon’s 50mm offerings. A pocket sized 40mm might just be the ticket so I ordered one right away. Below I have posted a hands on video with the lens so that you can get a bit of a feel for how small it is. I also give some …
Recently Canon announced the introduction of three new lenses to their EF lineup. The long awaited 24-70 f2.8 L II finally broke cover as well as two wide prime lenses with IS, the first of their kind. Much has been made about the projected $2300 price point for the new 24-70 though which is about $1200 more than you can currently get the previous version for. In the last couple of years Canon have updated some old lenses and introduced some new ones, all of which I have found to be exemplary so my gut feeling is that for pros, …
In the Fall of 2010 Canon announced the introduction of new MKIII extenders to replace the previous MKII versions. Super Spectra coatings were introduced to help reduce ghosting and flare as well as fluorine coating to make water spots and finer prints easier to remove. I’ve always fond the MKII extenders to be extremely useful when used in the right circumstances so I was eager to try out the MKIII versions to see if there was an improvement. Physical differences Since the introduction of the 800mm f5.6, Canon changed their off-white color of their telephoto lenses. All the new MKII …
The Canon EF 8-15 F4 L fisheye lens is one highly anticipated piece of glass ! First announced back in Autumn 2010 this is not a replacement of any existing lens, but an all new design with unique potential. Canon originally started with the 15mm f2.8 fisheye which was designed before the digital days. This lens provided a full 180 degree field of view on a full frame camera but users of 1.6 or 1.3 crop cameras were left with slightly less fishy look to their images. On the Nikon side of things, Nikkor released a beautiful 10.5mm fisheye for …
You might be wandering why I’m going to talk about this lens when Canon has already announced it’s replacement, due to hit store shelves in December 2011. Whilst it’s true that the new EF 500mm f4 L IS II is 17% lighter than this version, the optical improvements will be fairly minor. It’s tough to improve on the quality of any of Canon’s super telephotos. The list price of the upcoming MKII 500mm is $10,000 but the current version is selling for “only” $6900. When version 2 hits the second hand market there is sure to be an explosion of …