New Lens :)

By Cris | October 14, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

So, it’s a little early, but I’ve put together some money of my own, some from Jackie & Crisp, and some from my folks to get a new lens- I was going to wait to get it for my actual birthday, but the Canon refurbished website had a Columbus Day sale last weekend with everything 10% off their already excellent prices (I love the refurbished deals- I have bought a lot of stuff from there and have never had a problem, you really can’t tell it’s not new- in fact I reckon the lenses etc. from there are probably better calibrated etc. than new as they’ve been rechecked over by another technician), so I pounced while it was in stock and on sale 🙂

It’s a Canon 70-200mm f/4 L,

generally considered to be the best value Canon “L” lens you can get (the “L” designation is for their professional series of lenses- better optically and more robust than their non-L cousins). It is not the “IS” version (anti-vibration technology that obviates lens shake when handheld), but that one is twice the price (and a friend of mine has the top-of-the-line f/2.8 IS version that I can borrow if I need to). This one is lighter to carry and use, and with the excellent high ISO capabilities of the 6D I can get away with pushing up the ISO when I’m in low light situations.

I’ve been lusting after this lens for a long time and recently I have been following the videos of a landscape photographer called Thomas Heaton from the north of England who uses this lens a lot, rather than the more obvious wide-angle, to take many of his images, and that pushed me to make this my next purchase. And from the performance I’ve seen out of it today in a just an hour or so in the woods I think I did the right thing 🙂

I took my tripod along as to really get the best out of this lens it needs to be allowed to work at a lower shutter speed as you want to use a high aperture for large depth-of-field, and the lowest ISO for the highest quality images- in fact I’m starting to look into using ND filters to allow me to do some interesting long-exposure photography, but that’s for another day- this was just a quick walk around to see what this lens can do and familiarize myself with it 🙂

These were all taken with a circular polarizer to cut glare, and I hate the compression that Blogger uses to make the pictures a reasonable size- so if you’re interested I’ve uploaded them to Imgur here in higher resolution where you can click on them to see them in all their glory 🙂