Take this for what it’s worth, it’s just my personal experience. If you’ve been reading you know I recently rented the Canon Zoom Telephoto EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM Autofocus Lens. This lens tends to get fantastic reviews and I really thought after renting this lens I would want to start saving up to purchase it. I also thought it would be just the lens I needed to photograph Butterflies in flight.
Well, I don’t think I will be purchasing this lens right now after all. My primary issue with this lens is that it didn’t seem near as sharp as my 100-400mm lens I currently use. Some may say perhaps I got a bad copy of this lens and that could certainly be true. Honestly I’m really disappointed in some ways because I just expected this lens to blow me away and this just wasn’t the case. It also could be that I don’t quite have the necessary skills to take advantage of this lens. On the bright side, by trying to use this lens over the weekend, I started experimenting with the manual settings on my camera and I think this will lead to better pictures. By using the manual settings and adjusting the Aperture and Shutter Speed, I was able to take pictures of Butterflies in flight as long as there was semi-decent light. I didn’t think this was possible using my current lens because I didn’t think it could focus fast enough when compared to the 70-200. I was wrong.
Anyway, the good news is that I won’t be spending nearly $2000.00 for a new lens and this was a great learning experience for me. For anyone who is considering getting a new camera or lens, you may want to consider renting or borrowing a copy first as you may save hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Without renting this lens, I’m sure I would have bought this lens and then have been consistently disappointed.
I also read something this weekend that said something like “a great photographer can take a bad camera and bad lens and make wonderful photographs, whereas a bad photographer with a great camera and lens will take bad photographs.” That message really resonated with me for some reason. I think that it did show me that no matter what lens or camera I use, if I don’t better understand some of the basics of good photography, I simply wont be able to take great pictures, or pictures that look great to me. All this is really good though as I only spent 100.00 and feel this has spurred me to really start shooting in manual mode, where it’s essential I understand light, distance, focusing, patience, and perhaps most important, the behavior of the critter I am trying to take a picture of. For example (allow me to get all this off my chest so I can go back and read it and remind myself what I want to learn), if I wanted to take a picture of a Giant Swallowtail in flight versus a Pipevine Swallowtail. Previously I would just have turned the camera to the AV settings and started firing away. I’d be willing to bet that nearly all my shots of the Pipevine would have been less sharp than that of the Giant Swallowtail. Why? Because it is do with light (in this case) and knowing your subject. Giant Swallowtails are very slow flyers and they seem to hover as much as they do fly. A Pipevine Swallowtail is a much more frantic flyer, and his wings are dark, and these situations can fool a camera and over expose an image. I would now know that I would need to set a much faster shutter speed for the Pipevine Swallowtail than for the Giant Swallowtail. I really do love learning something new and this weekend has been good for that thanks to my decision to rent this lens before buying it.
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by texdr
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