New Toy

Getting a birthday present is always nice, of course. This one made me itch to go outside and hunt for nice motifs, though ... Images are straight from the camera, just a bit cropped (look at the EXIF if you feel like it.) If you don't want to look at the EXIF: the beautiful new lens is the Canon Canon EF 70-200mm 1:2.8 L IS II USM (like all manufacturers, Canon likes to collect funny abbreviations at the end of their product names — though I feel they're not as bad as some...), and I truly like what I'm seeing so far. That this lens has excellent sharpness goes without saying (especially on the 40D with modest 10MPixel on a crop sensor), see the comparison with the old EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM (the piccolo picture.) Beyond sharpness, there's the 1:2.8 aperture, the IS really keeps what it promises (and is absolutely silent), and AF is quiet and ultra fast as well. I've only got it today, so I took only a few shots — I'm confident that CA, flare resistance etc. will live up to reputation though. Now I'm really starting about a full frame camera with higher MP count to take full advantage of my lenses (you may remember that I quite like decent equipment; the wideangle is said to be usable for full frame down to ca. 14mm although it's really designed for crop sensor...)

The obvious question is if I really can take better pictures just because I'm now lugging around a 6kg bag of stuff ... but honestly, having a telephoto lens without image stabilisation was a pain, so getting the old tele replaced was the obvious next step.

Oh yes, and: see you in Banja Luka! :-)