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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Chickweed Geometer was one of the first moths I posted here, but these days I have much better camera equipment:
Haematopis grataria
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, 2009-10-04
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 spent the morning in Prospect Park with the Brooklyn Bird Club, but apparently the action was in Central park where Starr Saphir’s NYC Audubon walk found a Sedge Wren on the Great Hill, a relatively rare bird for New York. I didn’t get the news until I got home around 2:00 P.M. but the bird was still there when I arrived at 3:45:
I spent yesterday wandering around Fort Tilden, Jacob Riis Park, and Floyd Bennett Field with the Brooklyn Bird Club. Moths were everywhere. Most of them were large, skinny, and well hidden. They’d flutter up in front of you as you walked through the grass, then disappear into the grass where they’d hide behind a blade of grass. However I did manage to track a few to their resting place. Usually this would immediately spook them again, but I did get decent shots of a couple including this Lucerne Moth:
Nomophila nearctica, Hodges#5156
Fort Tilden, Queens, 2009-10-04
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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:
