Review: Canon 70-200mm F4 IS L

This lens rounds out the mid-range of my lenses, and is probably my favourite of the bunch. It is small and light but robust, and takes great images.

Canon 70-200mm F4 IS L

When I bought my first DSLR, the only lens I bought to go with it was the Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG, which for the price was a great beginner's lens to learn with. Unfortunately, you tend to get what you pay for with camera gear and after about 6 months or so I felt I was starting to reach the limits of what the lens could do in terms of speed (of both the AF and the aperture range at 300mm), and image quality so I started to look at upgrading. The first lens I found was the Canon 300mm F4 IS prime lens which I got a decent price on on ebay, but that meant I no longer had anything in the mid-zoom range. That was actually ok for a while since I was still spending most of my time shooting wildlife that was either small or far away, but once I started working on fishing boats and I began trying to photograph large birds at much closer range (gulls, gannets, skuas and kittiwakes mostly) I really needed something shorter than the 300mm lens to do it, and that's where the 70-200mm F4 IS came in.

The lens is relatively small and compact

The first thing that struck me about the Canon 70-200mm F4 IS L lens was the size of it - it is a relatively small and lightweight lens and looked rather unassuming when it came out of the box. After a few minutes on the camera though any doubts I might have had about the quality of this lens were thoroughly set aside! The autofocus on this lens (as with all Canon L lenses I've used) is silent and extremely quick to focus in 99% of circumstances (low contrast days pose more of an issue if there's grey birds against a grey sky over a grey sea) and the image stabilisation is a great help as it allows you to handhold at lower shutter speeds when shooting stationary or slow-moving subjects, or removing excess camera-shake while you're panning for an action shot. 

The 70-200mm F4 IS L was particularly useful for shooting kittiwakes which have a tendency to fly very close behind boats in a figure-of-eight path.

So how does the lens perform? As a wildlife lens, I'll admit it is pretty short for most purposes unless you're able to get up close to the action, or want to take wider-angle shots that convey more of a sense of habitat. For bird photography in particular I find it too short to be of much use in more than a handful of situations. It is however more than capable of capturing high-speed action shots outdoors and produces excellent results. It has also put up with the same rough handling that my other gear has (mud, salt, water, fish slime and many knocks and bumps) and has never given a hint of a problem, which is testament to the environmental sealing Canon add to their L-range lenses. But, at approximately £900-£1000 it's certainly not cheap, and unless you've already got a long lens I would advise against buying this one if you're interests are solely wildlife.

Silhouette at sunset

The bokeh is not as blurred as it would be at a wider aperture, but it's still very nice.

Where this lens really shines is in photographing people. The focal length means it produces no noticeable distortion of people's features that you see on wider lenses, and it produces a really nice bokeh when it's fully open which really helps separate your subject from the background. For photojournalism-style photography I can see this being an very good lens choice (though the whiteness does make you fairly noticeable...!), and it's an area I'm hoping to explore a bit more when I'm photographing for work.

The only real downside for me is that F4 is slower in low-light than it's F2.8 counterpart, so if you're shooting indoors or in poor conditions, particularly is you're wanting to shoot fast-moving subjects then you're going to need to use a higher ISO (assuming you keep your shutter speed high), which in turn results in some loss of image quality. How much of an issue that is will depend on your camera body, but with Canon recently releasing an updated version of the F2.8 version of this lens (the 70-200mm F2.8 IS L II), it's likely that good 2nd hand copies of the first version (which is reputedly a stunningly good lens) will be available for under £1000. If I was buying a lens in this range again today, and with no price difference between the two, I'd personally be tempted to go for the F2.8 and get the extra speed over the portability of the F4.

Review: Canon 300mm F4 IS L Lens (& 1.4x converter)

Whenever I go out to shoot wildlife, this is the lens that will be attached to my camera 95% of the time and it is absolutely cracking for what I need. A 300mm lens is not the longest lens for wildlife, and at F4 it is certainly not the fastest you can buy, but personally, I wouldn't swap it for anything, and here's why:

Weight

A baby swallow being fed on the wing by a parent

After I graduated from Glasgow University the first time around, and before I even had my own DSLR, I spent a summer working for a company offering wildlife boat tours in the Firth of Lorne, near Oban. The guy I was working for had just bought a 2nd hand Canon 1D MkII N and a 300mm F2.8 IS L lens and was more than happy to let me use it while we were out running the trips, which was great, but that early experience with that kit taught me two important things: firstly, if you're going to shoot wildlife at sea, you're pretty much going to have to handhold your camera to compensate for the swell. Secondly, handholding a setup that weighs over 3kg for long periods of time on a boat is going to screw your back up pretty quickly. I'll admit I'm not the strongest person in the world (though I'm pretty fit from diving), but holding that amount of weight in front of you while you wait for a shot really takes it out on your shoulders! So, as much as I might like to own a 300mm F2.8 or one of the longer super-telephoto lenses, the weight of them means they're just not practical for me. I'm sure they're amazing, but until it becomes practicable for me to use a tripod (or someone develops some kind of helium-balloon support), I will be sticking to the 300mm F4 which by contrast weighs in at just over 1kg. So it's still not what you'd call light, but it's certainly usable.

Cost & Flexibility

Fast shutter speeds get the most out of telephoto lenses

Another major consideration for me was the cost of the lens and how flexible it would be. Essentially, I wanted the best possible telephoto lens I could afford for the best price (under £1000), so it effectively came down to a choice between the Canon 300mm F4 IS L, 400mm F5.6 L and the 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 IS L. At the time when I was buying the lens (about 8 years ago), I was pretty sold on the idea of image stabilisation, so that was a factor which nudged me away from the 400mm. Between the 300mm prime and the zoom, it largely came down to reviews of the image quality, and the prime lens seemed to come out on top. Finally, the 300mm F4 is the only lens of the choices that is compatible with the 1.4x teleconverter without losing autofocus (on EOS bodies at least) which nudges the zoom up to 420mm with minimal loss of image quality at the cost of one f-stop.

In the end I got lucky with ebay and managed to find an excellent 2nd hand copy for just under £600 which was a bit of a bargain and sealed the deal! 

Image Quality

Stabilisation allows you to use a lower shutter speed for still  subjects or easier tracking for fast ones

At the end of the day this was really the most important thing and I haven't been disappointed. This is a great lens for wildlife, but as with all telephoto lenses it really needs a fast shutter speed to get the most out of it. I'm also glad it has IS as this makes a very noticeable difference when hand-holding the camera - if you switch it on and off you can actually see the difference it makes through the viewfinder! Even if it will never slow down your subject, it removes enough wobbliness to make tracking fast animals even easier, and if you use it on stationary or slow moving subjects it will apparently compensate for four-stops worth less light than without.

A mackerel chasing a sandeel out of the sea at Tjarno, Sweden.

Other than that, the lens is silent, focuses incredibly quickly and accurately and has been absolutely reliable no matter what I've thrown at it (which is a lot). It is is cosmetically rather more battered and scuffed than it was when it was delivered, thanks to hundreds of hours spent on fishing boats, research, boats and RIBs but despite everything it's still as good as it's ever been, which says a lot about how Canon build and seal their L lenses!

This is still a crop from the original - 300mm lenses (even with the converter) are still quite short for wildlife

Adding the Canon 1.4x teleconverter costs you one stop, reducing the maximum aperture to F5.6, so you lose a bit of speed and you don't get quite the same knife-edge depth of field that you can get on wider aperture lenses. Saying that, it still produces excellent separation between the subject and the background and is certainly a lens to consider if the points raised here are important to you.

A gull taking off at dawn

Prime lenses in general tend to be higher quality than zoom lenses, but choosing a prime does mean that you have no choice in terms of the focal length you get, and if you want to use something else, you will need to physically change lenses. For me, this has never really posed much of an issue, but I tend to shoot animals and birds that congregate in groups so it's relatively easy to choose an appropriate subject. And regardless, 90% of the time the problem will be that you can't get as close as you would like to a subject anyway, so I've very rarely found myself wishing I had a shorter lens attached to my camera! Still, if that is something that you think you might need, then something like the 100-400mm zoom might be a better option.


Conclusions
Honestly? I love this lens. With the 1.4x converter attached it produces excellent quality images and provides a decent amount of zoom for photographing wildlife. It's also relatively affordable and extremely lightweight compared to the super-telephotos you can buy, without compromising on build quality or reliability. I can't honestly say how this configuration compares to the 100-400mm zoom or the 400 F5.6 prime lenses as I've never used them myself, but I believe it would be hard to go too far wrong with any of them.

Review: Canon 17-40mm F4 L

Well look what arrived in the post today:

Shiny!

Up to now, I've always used the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 zoom lens to cover this range, and I've been almost completely happy with them. The Tamron's produce excellent images (especially on 1.6 crop sensors), and have an extra f-stop and 10mm at the zoom end over the Canon 17-40mm which I must admit I think I'll miss.

So why did I buy the Canon? Essentially it's because I'm completely sold on Canon's weather-sealing and I'm about to lose the second Tamron in 2 years to salt and/or water and/or mud and/or slime damage so I figured it was time to make a switch. As you will know if you've already read about my photography gear, I give my stuff a pretty hard time. Aside from dragging it around on boats wherever I go, I don't even have a proper camera bag and tend to just shove it all into a rucksack with my lunch if I'm heading out anywhere. I'll use it in rain, seaspray, snow or whatever and I've alarmed more than a few people with the amount of mud and fish scales that have occasionally coated it! The lenses and camera are covered in scrapes and bumps, but not a single bit of it has ever stopped working or failed to produce images as sharp and clear as the day I bought the kit. Except the Tamron. Which is a real shame because like I said, it's a great lens and I'll miss it.

Anyway, my first impressions of the Canon 17-40mm so far are pretty much that it works. I wandered through the main campus at Glasgow University on my way home today and took loads of pictures of wildflowers, architectural shots, a view of Glasgow from the top of the hill, and even a load of shots from a graduation celebration in the main quadrangle, which was great until I got home and the thunder and lightning started and I got too excited... In my haste to try and shoot the storm, I deleted everything off my memory card to make room for the video files and I lost everything I'd shot today. So I don't really have anything very sensible to say about the images as yet, so I'll just show you this frame grab instead!

Lightning strike over Glasgow city, with an Alexander 'Greek' Thompson building in the foreground (which wasn't hit).

The only things I can really say about the lens so far though are that the autofocus is absolutely silent (to the point that I thought I'd switched it off completely) and incredibly fast and the build is nice and light, but feels sturdy. The zoom ring feels a little heavier than I'm used to from my other lenses, but it's not a big deal at all. The one thing I can't quite figure out is the ridiculous lens hood that is supplied with the lens. It's absolutely enormous and converts an otherwise perfectly normal-looking lens into  something that looks more like a giant cartoon flower. Maybe it's just there to make it look more impressive, but I can't imagine it offers that much protection or shading? I'll use it anyway since it can't hurt (except to make it slightly more awkward to squish everything into that rucksack), and since I regularly whack lenses off things it makes more sense to have the lens hood take the impact than the glass. Still, I'm pretty glad I bought a polariser to fit it as well since there doesn't seem to be a lot of front-end protection there.

Normal lens

Enormous flower-thing! 

Anyway, if the weather stops terrifying the dog long enough that we can actually go outside again for more than 30 seconds I'll hopefully have some replacement photos to share with you from this lens over the weekend. If not, the hound will have to be my test subject!

UPDATE!
Ok, so the weather improved over the weekend and although we couldn't head out of the city because we had some friends staying over, I took a wee trip out to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the Kibble Palace to test the lens out. I'm quite pleased with it! Here are a few test shots, all taken wide open at F4 across the zoom range. None of these have been sharpened, so they're shown here as they were shot:

Koi carp in the Kibble Palace pond. The glass roof is reflected in the water.

A close-up of one of the statues ('Stepping Stones')

As a portrait lens, it's pretty nice at the 40mm end. Kev was angry I made him look at plants.

Close up of a banana leaf

A close up of a red flower. The bokeh is quite nice, though it doesn't give the same separation of subject and background that you can get with wider aperture lenses.

Triffids! ... I mean Venus fly traps and pitcher plants

I'm pretty impressed with this. The sharpness and overall image quality already seem better than I was getting with the Tamron 17-50mm so I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs in more 'real-life' shooting scenarios on the next research cruise. It looks pretty nice as a short portrait lens (at the 40mm end), but the 17mm end shows a fair amount of distortion as you'd expect. It's not as bad as the fisheye, but it's not very flattering!