Mokka mit Schlag » Photography

This weekend I rented a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM zoom lens. This is the first L series lens I’ve used for any length of time. Unfortunately, yesterday was too rainy and overcast to give it a real workout; but today was much clearer and I got to the park bright and early around 8 AM. Wow. the difference between this lens and the lenses I had been using bird photography was like night and day. Just look at this House Sparrow:

With and without flash, the images were crisp, sharp, and more often than not in focus. I was actually able to start choosing which images to keep based on composition and the interest of the picture. I no longer had to select only the one or two sharp images out of 100. For the first time, I was able to take super telephoto pictures that came out as sharp as the images taken with my hundred millimeter prime lens.
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This weekend I took the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS DO USM out for a spin. The DO stands for “Diffractive Optics” which makes the lens a little sharper and a lot more expensive than the regular Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS USM lens. There were some nice photos like this Yellow-rumped Warbler:

However, it’s still not sharp enough for my taste, as seen when you zoom in:
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One of the promises of the EF-S lens mount was that the lenses could be smaller, lighter weight, and cheaper than full frame lenses. What happened?

While there are a dozen or so EF-S lenses on the market, and they are indeed smaller and cheaper than their full frame cousins, they’re all pretty low-end lenses. All the DO and L-series lenses are full frame lenses, which means I’m carrying a lot more weight than I’d like (and I could really feel that this morning at Jamaica Bay).
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I’m still looking for a good, general purpose lens with an emphasis on nature shots so I rented a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM for 10 days. That was too long. Within 20 minutes, it was obvious this was not a good lens. It’s incredibly blurry at all lengths from 70-300mm and all subject distances. It’s decidedly inferior to the cheaper Tamron 28-300, which, while not satisfying me, does well on at least some subjects. If the Canon works on anything, I didn’t find it. Besides general lack of sharpness, it also had very poor close focus and was too long at the short end to do decent portraits. If this lens is good for anything, I didn’t notice it.

The results are vaguely plausible if you reduce the size of the image, which tends to sharpen things up:

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I shoot raw with an EOS 50D. I display my pictures pretty much exclusively on the Web as JPEGs, and almost never print them. I import, edit, and catalog raw files in Adobe Lightroom 2.4 on a Mac with OS X 10.5. Of course many people who view my pictures use Linux and Windows as well.

What color space should I choose? sRGB or Adobe RGB, and when does this make a difference?
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I was reading Arthur Morris’s blog today when I noticed that he was shooting with wildly different settings than I was. He seemed to be using a wide open aperture, and a relatively high 400 ISO even in sunlight, while relying on the camera to eliminate grain. This let him shoot with shutter speeds as fast as 1/2000 of a second. He had much better lenses than I did, but I still thought it might be worth a try, so I took a quick spin around the ponds at Mason Park in the late afternoon and see how this did. My lens would only open up to f/6.3 at 300mm–his could get as wide as f/4–but it did make a big difference as seen in this photo of a Western Bluebird:

Western Bluebird
Tamron 28-300 Di VC on an EOS 50D body, ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/2000s

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