Bali Photographer / Thoughts and Portfolio

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM is the third lens I resold within the only few months of my Canon days. All of them only stayed in my dry box for few weeks, less than a month. Money I spent on lenses was definitely hard-earned, and therefore reselling which in many cases involve a little - or big - loss, was something I was hesitate to do.

The first one I resold was Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II which I replaced with manual focusing Carl Zeiss Planar T* 50mm f/1.4. The second one was Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM, which I do not get a replacement yet, but looking into either the weight light Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM (non IS) or reasonably priced Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 II EX DG Macro HSM. I occasionally resold lenses during my Nikon years, but none of them was reasoned by disappointment.

Before I decided to leave Nikon, I read an article written by professional photographer - which clearly a Canon defender - saying “Nikon is a small company with smart optical engineers whilst Canon is a huge corporation investing enormous amount of money in digital technology research”. Apparently he was saying it to expose superiority in Canon’s image quality, which I personally got convinced. From that point of view, I am a happy Canon user now. Unfortunately it also confirmed my rather suffering experience in using Canon lenses.

I do know that most of professional photographers - except those specializing themselves in wedding photography - omit presence of mid focal range zoom in their setup. But I am not a professional photographer myself and I thought it was nice to have a walk around lens as a convenient setup for travel. Reasonable wide range of focal length of Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM at affordable weight and price was my considerations.

As usual, I surfed online reviews before making the decision. Actually my favorite was Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM which I thought was too expensive for me, especially for lens in rarely used range. I am not interested in either wedding photography or photojournalism. I also skipped Canon EF 28-300mm f/2.5-5.6 L IS USM for its very expensive price and rather hefty size for travel convenience. Actually Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM was not that cheap either. It was actually among the the most expensive EF (non L) lenses at its exposure size.

In precise, my disappointment came from its auto focus performance, which was terrible in back-lighting and did not work at all in dim light (note this: dim, not dark). I do know that AF does not work in darkness, but here I am talking about the dim light where most other lenses could normally afford. The more annoyance was that when it failed to lock, it froze instead of keep on searching, so I had to release the shutter, point to other subject at extremely different distance, before retrying another attempt.

Whilst my ears hated its sound, IS worked fine. It roughly let me to get reasonable sharpness in up to three stops at the shortest focal length and close to two stops in its longest focal length. However, unlike a Nikonian friend of mine who very much adores VR (Nikon’s version of IS), IS is not something I would not miss when it is not available for following reasons.

• It is kind of reflex, when I need to shoot low light my hands grab 50mm f/1.4 which gives exactly 3 stops more light compared to about 4.5-5.6 of Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM at the same focal length. I do not worry too much about depth of field in large aperture as shooting reasonable distance in normal focal length is definitely giving reasonable amount of DOF. However, when I do want to isolate DOF for pleasant bokeh, 50mm f/1.4 definitely wins.
• I rarely need to shoot telephoto in low light.
• So far in my experience, IS comes at its strength on photojournalism, sport, wedding - all of which I am not in - and candid, which is nice to have, but only forth for fun. For high quality pictures, I will use a tripod anyway.
• Among excels of the full frame sensor planted in Canon EOS 5D I am using is high ISO performance. So would have no problem in raising ISO at equal stop to compensate absence of IS. In fact I would prefer to raise ISO at low light, maybe not to extreme level of 1600-3200, but somewhere in the range between 400-800 gives pleasant effect on low light and portraits.

I tink my last sentences in this article will be: native Canoners may not realize this, but for Nikonians I would advise not to leave Nikon unless you can afford to buy Canon lenses in its L series. Out of this elite class, even the cheapest Nikon glass wins. As of myself, except for primes, I will never buy Canon lens out of its L series, ever again.