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 7D

So I figured that since I wrote a whole post yesterday on my new Canon 17-40mm lens, this is probably as good an opportunity as any to write in a bit more detail about some of my other gear, starting with my photography kit! Today's review is on the Canon 7D DSLR body.

The Canon 7D

Canon 7D with 300mm F4 IS L lens + 1.4x teleconverter.

The Canon 7D was released a couple of years ago now back in Autumn 2009 effectively as a 'sports' alternative to the Canon 5D Mk2 which was released about the same time. With the 5D Mk2 offering a massive number of megapixels (22.2), a HUGE ISO range (up to 25600) and the same amazing image quality as its predecessor, the 7D had a lot to live up to. By comparison, the 7D has (slightly) fewer megapixels (18MP), a (1.6x) crop sensor, and worse ISO performance. But then again, none of that really matters because this camera is built for speed.

You can read all about the specifications of this camera elsewhere, but the most interesting updates from my point of view when I bought it were the really fast and accurate autofocus (said to rival the AF of the much-adored Canon 1D Mk II) and the whopping 10 frames-per-second (fps) continuous shooting rate. The accuracy of the autofocus was something I was keen to improve at that point, as I'd been shooting with a Canon 40D for a while by then and was finding it frustratingly slow at times, particularly when trying to shoot birds in the chaos that follows behind fishing boats.

First Impressions

I spend two days looking at specks of flying drool and wondering why they weren't sharp enough. Sigh.

My first impressions of the 7D when I bought it two years ago were that it a) sometimes took awesome photos and b) was a far more technical camera than I had been used to up to that point. I spent a few weeks with the manual and testing it out at Caerlaverock WWT reserve on geese and on my (rather quick) dog and his frisbee. Then I spent another few days driving myself crazy looking at 100% crops of the images I was taking and wondering why they weren't quite up to the standards I was expecting. After testing the sharpness of my lenses (all are spot on) and deciding that it probably wasn't the 7D body (results were inconsistent), it turned out to be user error (I was basically using too slow a shutter speed for too-fast subjects!). Interestingly though, I'd written off a lot of soft images from the 400D or 40D as being the fault of the camera and it took the 7D to make me really reassess the way I had been shooting and how to really get the most out of a camera. It probably means I was always a bit unfair on the other cameras I'd had, but it forced me to become a better photographer and to think a lot more about what I was actually doing when I went out to shoot.

Later Impressions
After that rather steep learning curve at the start, the 7D has never disappointed. The AF isn't perfect, and it will miss subjects, particularly when there's low contrast (e.g. shooting grey birds on a cloudy, grey day) or if they're moving fast over a close backdrop (e.g. low flying over the sea) but when it gets a subject (and it will catch on quickly!) it will definitely catch it. One problem I had with the 40D was that it would partially focus on subjects fairly often, but the 7D doesn't do this nearly as much and things tend to be either in focus or completely missed. The 10 fps is also very handy, and although using long bursts will eat up the processing power within a second or two, it can make for some cool time-lapse sequences and if used sparingly, can often make the difference between getting a usable or a completely useless photograph. 

Shot at ISO6400 in the middle of the night with only a ship's light to illuminate the sea. It's not brilliant, but perfectly acceptable as an ID photo.

The ISO performance on this camera is pretty good too. At anything much above about 400ISO, you do really start to notice the graininess coming into the images, which is a bit of a shame but probably fairly inevitable given the number of MP squeezed onto the sensor. Image quality in general though is excellent, and I must admit that the 18MP resolution means you can crop an image in pretty far and still maintain a good resolution image, which is a nice cheat if you can't afford a super-zoom (I can't).

After two years of trying I was finally able to get this shot!

One of the main reasons I wanted a camera upgrade was so I could get a decent photograph of a gannet diving into the water. For whatever reason, I'd never managed to get that shot before with my old gear, but the hit rate went up massively with the 7D, so I'm guessing it wasn't entirely down to human error! Gannets can reach 60mph when they hit the surface of the sea, so they present a pretty big challenge to spot, focus on, track and shoot. Thanks to this camera (and plenty of practice), I was able to FINALLY get the result I wanted!

Environmental Sealing

Shooting a timelapse series of our journey down the Clyde at the start of our last research cruise. My camera's under the hat and the timer is in the rucksack. It was cold.

I thought this might deserve special mention since I've probably done just about everything to this camera short of dropping it or drowning it (and it's come close to the latter). In the two years I've owned my 7D I've taken it out on about a dozen fishing boats, covered it in mud, salt, fish slime and water and battered it off several walls, floors and railings, and in all that time it's never had any kind of issue (not even a dusty sensor). It undoubtedly helps that I almost exclusively use weather-sealed lenses when I'm outdoors but it's pretty reassuring. After all, what's the point in owning something if you can't use it when you want to?

Stuff I never thought I'd use
As you've probably noticed, I've really only talked about the AF and the fps so far, because those were the things I bought the camera for, but there are a ton of other features that I've slowly started to use, even though I never thought I'd bother with them. The HD video is one of those features, and it's still not something I'm using a lot. It has been good fun to play with though and if nothing else is enough to satisfy my curiosity about whether video is something I want to get into a bit more. I wish it had continuous autofocus, but aside from that, seems to be pretty nice!

The other feature I've started using more is the live viewfinder on the back. Not being a macro photographer, I've never really bothered with this as a feature as I prefer using the 'normal' viewfinder (I'm oldskool like that!), but it certainly has it's uses and I've found myself using it increasingly to frame shots at awkward camera angles which is handy. I also understand why people love adjustable live viewfinders!

Summary
Before I bought this camera I used to spend a long time hopelessly lusting after cameras like the 1D MKIII or IV wishing I had something that would just shoot a bit faster or grab subjects a bit quicker. Since owning the 7D I don't think I've bothered to look at any other cameras - this one is still going strong and it provides everything I need in a camera body. The crop sensor, high resolution and really fast speeds all combine to make it an excellent sports or wildlife camera. You don't get quite the resolution or the image quality that you can get with a (full frame) 5D MKII or III, so if those things are important to you, then the 7D might not be the camera you want. If you're after something reliable, super-fast and affordable for shooting fast-moving things then you could certainly do far, far worse.