70-200mm lenses

[edolyne]

Great choice in lens. The L glass is amazing and from what I understand the f/4 is sharper at f/4 than the f/2.8 is at f/4.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Congrats. The 70-200 f/4 is a great lens. My first "expensive" lens was a 70-200. I bought it six years and it is still my most used and favorite lens today.

Always use your hood with it. I won't weigh in on whether you should use a UV filter (that's a personal/religious choice), but you should definitely use your hood.

If I recall, the f/4 is light enough not to need a tripod collar and it doesn't come with one. You might consider getting one if you find yourself doing a lot of tripod shooting and frequently switching from portrait to landscape. With the collar, you just loosen it and you can rotate the camera to any orientation you want. If you do get one and your tripod takes arca-swiss plates, order a plate for the tripod collar. I suggest that you get one that has another tripod mounting screw hole built into the plate. That way, if you ever go the Black Rapid strap route, you can attach it to the lens without taking off the plate. I learned that the hard way.

I think it has a focus range limiter switch. That can be useful when you are shooting birds, planes, or other stuff in the sky. In those cases, without the range limiter, if you loose tracking on your subject, the lens has to try the entire focus range (which can take an unbearably long time). With the limiter, it has less range to hunt through. I leave my limiter off except for those cases when I'm tracking a subject against a featureless background.

I think the f/4 has a pretty small filter diameter. It's something like a 68mm. I recommend that you don't buy filters that size. Instead, get a step-up ring and buy either 72mm or 77mm filters. They will perform the same on your lens, but you'll be able to use them on future lenses. The 77mm seems to be the standard on a lot of canon zooms (17-40, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70, 24-105). The 72mm is used on some primes (85 f/1.2, 135 f/2). It's much cheaper to buy one larger polarizer and step-up filters rather than different polarizers for each lens size.

 

[Bstanley]

Always use your hood with it.

Ok. I like hoods in any case (bought one for the kit lense for example), but this lens certainly deserves as much 'cover' as possible.

If I recall, the f/4 is light enough not to need a tripod collar and it doesn't come with one. You might consider getting one

With the Rebel XS body at 1 Lb and the lens at 1 1/2 Lb I'm hoping that I can do a lot of shooting freehand with the setup. However in preparation for the trip, where I expect to do an interesting amount of shooting off a tripod, it seemed like a lens collar made a lot of sense for balance reasons (hanging 1 1/2 Lbs off the front of a 1 Lb camera) so I did buy one. I also bought a new tripod and ball head.

Thanks for the other advice - moving from pure amateur to the next level I can use all the help I can get.

 

[bob100]

I think the f/4 has a pretty small filter diameter. It's something like a 68mm. I recommend that you don't buy filters that size. Instead, get a step-up ring and buy either 72mm or 77mm filters. They will perform the same on your lens, but you'll be able to use them on future lenses. The 77mm seems to be the standard on a lot of canon zooms (17-40, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70, 24-105). The 72mm is used on some primes (85 f/1.2, 135 f/2). It's much cheaper to buy one larger polarizer and step-up filters rather than different polarizers for each lens size.

sounds like a good suggestion, it gets expensive buying filters for all the different size lens!

 

[Bstanley]

I am now officially spoiled. It was a nice day so I thought I would take a trip across the bay and see if I could spot any 'oil protection' activity. I ended up taking a bunch of pictures - mostly birds and boats. The new lens is great to work with - very fast and certain with it's focus, even as I tracked things and really well balanced with a Rebel XS hanging off the back of it.

With the lens collar on and a ball-head quick-connect attached to the collar it makes a great little hand hold - and my fingers naturally wrap around the zoom ring. Very nice ergonomics for me.

With the lens hood attached this thing looks absurd, but it really does take very crisp pictures. I forgot I had an extra 1/3 EV dialed in on the camera and since I haven't tweaked the following picture at all - except to crop a bit, they are a bit overamped, but that is not the fault of the lens.

The second of the flower pictures is a 100% crop.

Hard to swallow for us amateurs, but spending more money on the lens than on the body really paid off in this case...oh - I also joined SmugMug so if you are inclined to see the pics full size - here's My brand new Smug Mug Gallery.

 

[Bstanley]

So here are a few that I've made a first pass at editing.

 

[disneyboy2003]

Your photos are really nice and sharp! Congratulations on your brand new lens! Hope you give it a really good work-out!

 

[Bstanley]

So yesterday was a rainy day - late in the afternoon though I was able to take some pictures with a bit more color in them than those from the previous day when the rain let up for few moments.

"Watch the Birdie"

There's a Ladybug hidden in the following picture...although it's much easier to see on the full size version on Smugmug.