Skip forward a whole month (!) to October 2007, and this was the point I took the step to upgrade the kit zoom lens (the 18-55 non-IS which is known for not being the sharpest of lenses). After much thinking about it, I decided on the Sigma 17-70 which started at f2.8 at 17mm (although only to about 20mm).
(Click this link to start from part 1 or part 2...)
To be honest, in the 2 years or so that I owned this lens I kept looking at upgrades but I just couldn't justify them. It was a great lens, focussing well, nice quality and the range was brilliant - only the Canon 17-85 IS matched it's range but that had serious CA issues and cost quite a bit more - in my mind not worth the upgrade. The only reason I sold it was my upgrade to a full frame camera, and the 17-70 being a Sigma DC lens isn't meant for full frame cameras.
These two were taken with the 17-70 - the left one showing the Macro functionality.
Battery Grip
At some point I got a battery grip. I got a good deal on it - I can't remember the price but it was of the order of £50. On the 400D this was great - it balanced the camera against the 70-200 f4L IS by giving the body a bit more weight, and you could put two batteries in at once which doubles the battery life - this was brilliant as for a normal day you just didn't have to bother worrying about the batteries.
The best thing about the grip, though, was the vertical shutter button. This means that when you turn the camera on it's side, you have a a shutter button in the normal place (top right), as well as the wheel for the control of aperture and shutter speed on the 400D. I bought the Canon E1 strap too which only works if you've got a grip or a 1D series camera, but allows you to hold the camera securely in your hand - this was a worthwhile investment too.
Wide, wide, wide - Sigma 10-20
We were going away at Christmas 2007 to Cornwall, and I'd been eyeing up something wider than 17mm for quite some time. As I was to have an opportunity to take lots of pictures over the week, I found a decent price-match voucher and trotted off to Jessops (again!) to get a Sigma 10-20mm lens.
This was an absolutely super lens (I speak in the past tense as like most of the original lenses I bought I've since parted with this one). I can tell you that although 7mm might not sound a lot (from 17mm down to 10mm), it completely changes the perspective of the images. You have to be much more careful with composition as the field of view is so much greater that you can get all sorts of clutter in there. But you can be really imaginative with it too! Another lens I can highly recommend for a cropped sensor body.
A night view from Penzance
Evening by the sea in Cornwall
The Eden Project
My next DSLR - 40D
April 2008 - although I liked the 400D, I was yearning for something a bit more serious. Although the 40D has the same megapixel count (10MP), it offered quite a bit more than the 400D, and I took the plunge and upgraded.
While I had convinced myself that it would probably be a worthwhile upgrade, I wasn't sure I would really notice a huge amount of difference between the cameras, but I got it at a good price (including a £100 cashback from Canon).
I remember playing around with it after charging the battery and sticking the 70-200 f4L IS lens on. The feel of the camera was considerably better in my hands, the viewfinder was clearer and brighter (using a pentaprism instead of the pentamirror arrangement in the 400D), and I quickly got used to the second control wheel on the back of the camera. The 6.5fps (compared to about 3fps on the 400D) was fun and I could see good uses for this. I shot a few pics out the back window - one in particular of this pigeon:
Pigeon - one of my first 40D shots
The funny thing about it was that I reviewed the images on the screen on the back of the camera (which was a bit bigger than the 400D, but no better resolution), and was happy with the look of the images. Not blown away, but then I wasn't expecting to be as the sensor was very similar to the 400D and I wasn't expecting much more from the images.
It wasn't until the next day that I downloaded the images to the computer and had a look. When I saw the comparison shots between the 400D and the 40D of the pigeon on the roof of the garage, I nearly fell of my chair! Totally unexpectedly, the 40D image had so much more feather detail and sharpness. I suddenly felt that it had all be worth it :-)
After some further analysis, I'm fairly convinced that while the 40D seems sharper, I think it's focus ability is considerably better than the 400D and this is where the improvement lay. But still, I did love the comparison between the two pigeon images.
The next step was down to the local park to make full use of the 6.5fps and the focus ability shooting birds on the lake:
Gull on Poole Park lake
Here's another shot with the 40D and 70-200 f4L IS - this is an important shot for me, as I'll explain later...
Swan and Cygnets, Bicton Park (40D, 70-200f4L IS)
Macro - 100mm f2.8
In June of 2008, I got a macro lens. Over the preceeding months, I had seen fantastic macro images, and decided I wanted to try them. The great thing about lenses is that you can go and buy one from a shop, and if you don't get on with it you can sell it, typically for about 80-90% of what you paid for it.
Once again, though, I love this macro lens! In the shop, I tried out the Sigma 105mm macro and the Canon 100mm macro. Although the Sigma came with a hood and (from memory) a tripod ring, I opted for the Canon for both compatibility with any future cameras and reviews generally talked about this as being one of Canon's sharpest lenses. They were also doing cashback at this time too, so I got it for £40 less than the shop price.
Cotton Buds
The true definition of a macro lens is one that can reach a magnification of 1:1 or greater, so the image on the sensor is at least the same size as real life. This opens huge possibilities, especially when that life size image is spread across 10's of millions of pixels.
Ladybird Larva
The biggest issue with a macro lens is light - depth of field at 1:1 magnification is microscopic (literally!). At f2.8, you end up with a DoF of millimetres or less, so you need to close down the aperture - I find typically f11-f16 gives me something approaching the DoF I want. For this, you need light, and I tend to use my flash with an off-shoe cord as this allows you to position the flash where you think it will produce the best light. I'll post some of my findings from macro photography in another post as it's a complex and in-depth subject with lots of variables.
Toadstool detail
Full Frame - 5D mark 2, 24-70L
Skip forward to August 2009. The local camera shop (bit of advertising here: Castle Cameras - I've spent quite a lot of money here, and unlike Jessops they actually generally know what they're talking about!) was having an "Open Day" at a Bournemouth Hotel, where lots of manufacturers were present to show off their wares. I had been planning to go along to this, but on the same day, my Swan and Cygnets picture (above) was published in several national newspapers and I ended up with quite a few quid from it!
So that was a bad combination - I'm in a room surrounded by all sorts of stuff that I like, buzzing of my first national publication and knowing there's a few bob in the bank from it. So, after playing briefly with a 1D mk3 (which I would have loved, but the price had jumped £700 in recent months and there was no way I was going for that), I walked out with a 5D mark 2 and 24-70L lens, and a crying credit card.
After confessing to my wife, who was somewhat taken aback by my unexpected extravagance (unsuprising really - I could have bought a reasonably decent second hand car for that amount), I had a play. Here's one of the first pictures I took:
Holly - ISO 6400
Bearing in mind I was coming from a 40D which had noisy ISO 1600, this picture blew my mind! Yes, it's scaled down which reduces the noise, but still it's ISO 6400 and that would print pretty cleanly at 8x10 without any problems! Absolutley brilliant!
We went off on holiday to Devon (I always seem to get new cameras just before holidays - should probably stop going on holidays?), and I gave the 5D2 a good run:
Chesil Beach at Abbotsbury
Hay Tor - Evening View
The 5D2 is an absolute beauty. Full frame gives you a shallower DoF, although this isn't as massive a difference from a cropped camera as some people make out. The high ISO performance is amazing - I'm still suprised at how clean the images are, and have recently taken night shots at ISO 25600 which, while noisy, capture something that wouldn't have been easily captured otherwise. The ClearView screen on the back is an amazing upgrade from the low resolution one on the 40D. All in all, it's an amazing camera, and 6 months on as I write this, I'm still loving it (despite recently getting a 7D... I'll get on to that later).
Getting back to wide: 17-40L
The one problem with going from a 40D to a 5D2 is that some of my key lenses became less justifiable - I didn't want to have a set of EF-S or Sigma DC lenses (for cropped bodies) and an equivalent set for full frame - that's just too much money to have lying around in a draw not being used.
So, I decided my Sigma 10-20 and Sigma 17-70 were going to have to go. The 17-70 was already sort-of replaced by the 24-70L on the 5D (17-70 would be 27-112mm on a full frame, so I was losing a bit of telephoto in exchange for a little bit of wide angle, but I was happy with that as the 24-70 is constant f2.8).
What I was less happy about losing was the 10-20mm - to replicate this I would need 16-32mm on the 5D2. That left me 2 options - the Canon 17-40L f4 or the Canon 16-35L f2.8. The 16-35L is arguably a better lens, but the big problem is it's twice the price of the 17-40, and after reviewing lots of images from the 17-40L and the 16-35L, I decided I would get plenty of use from the 17-40L. So that's what I went for...
Hartley Wintney Cricket Ground
Autumn Leaves
Eye Bridge, Wimborne, Dorset
Although the 17-40L only gives you 7mm extra, those 7mm make a big difference. They take some getting used to and can make composition more difficult to avoid clutter, but they also give you great artistic possibilities. I will write a post at some point about UWA (ultra wide angle) shooting...
Reaching out: Sigma 120-400OS
There is something called "Crop Factor" which you may have heard about. Briefly, this relates to the change in field of view of an image due to the difference in sensor size. People talk of extra "reach" with cropped sensors, but in reality it's all a bit of an illusion. I'm going to write a post on this as it's an often misunderstood subject and I've only properly got my head round it since being subjected to the difference with my full frame 5D2.
Anyway, in essence, what you see through the viewfinder of a full frame camera with a 200mm lens on is a significantly wider image than with a cropped camera (like my 40D). The 200mm lens on the 5D feels like a 125mm lens on the 5D2 (I know this is the opposite way round of looking at it to what you normally see on the web, but I was coming from cropped camera to full frame so this is how I looked at it initially).
While the 5D2 has 21 million pixels and the 40D only has 10 million (only! that's still quite few!), cropping the 5D2 to use 1/1.6 of the area results in only using just over 8 million pixels, so there should be more detail on the 40D. Add to that the better auto focus system on the 40D, and you can see that it should surpass the 5D2 for focal-length limited action. I never quite made my mind up about this, but I tended to leave the longer lenses on the 40D and use the 5D2 for landscape and portrait.
On with the story - it was my birthday in October, so I stuck some bits and pieces together, along with a helping hand from the tax man, and got a superb price on a used Sigma 120-400OS. Whilst ideally I would like to get the Canon 100-400L, it worked out at nearly 4x the price, and I wanted to see if I'd get on with this focal length before shelling out that sort of money.
Harry at Halloween with the 120-400OS
Robin, Basingstoke Canal, 120-400OS
How am I getting on with the 120-400OS? To be honest, it's quite soft at f5.6, but fairly decent at f8. Because of this, and the fact that I'm tending to use it on a cropped body, you need enough light to get a shutter speed of at least 1/250s (because of the OS), but ideally 1/500s or faster, and at f8 that's not typical in British winter! So I haven't used it a huge amount, but I've been planning on playing lots when the weather gets better. On the whole, I do like it though.
That brings me up to a few weeks ago - the point where I went out on a Sunday morning and bought a 7D! I'm in the process of parting with my 40D, and there will be lots of info on the 7D coming up as I use it more and more...
This post is in 3 parts (this is part 3) - you can get the part 1 or part 2 by clicking these links)
This post is in 3 parts (this is part 3) - you can get the part 1 or part 2 by clicking these links)
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