Tag Archives: canon

Deals and Sales, Equipment

November Canon Instant Rebates

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Canon currently has an “instant savings” promotion on a number of lenses and a speedlite through November 23, 2011. Here is a list of most of the qualifying products, with links to site sponsor B&H Photo. In many cases the “instant savings” price is considerably lower than the B&H “import” version of the product.

If you find this list to be helpful, please use the links on this page to make your purchase from site sponsor B&H and help support this blog. Thanks!

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Equipment

Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L II vs. 24-70mm f/4L IS vs. 24-105mm f/4 L IS (and more?)

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Anyone who spends any time in photography forums discussing Canon lenses has seen this topic come up regularly: the comparisons between the 24-70 and 24-105mm L zoom options. If you follow this subject you are familiar with posts asking which of these lenses is “best” or claiming that one or another is great and the others are poor, and with the ensuing debates. Rather than re-writing what I have to say about this every time the subject comes up, I thought I would post once here and then link back to this article.

(Update 1/4/13: Things have changed in significant ways since I first posted this review back in 2011 – primarily with the introduction of two newer Canon 24-70mm L zooms. I have made a few updates to this post to reflect those changes. I have now had the opportunity to use the updated Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II lens. It is also a very fine lens and a great performer. In addition, there is now a Canon EF 24-70mm f/4.0L IS USM lens as well, and the Canon 24-105mm f/4L F/4.0L IS lens is still available. Canon shooters have an over-abundance of good lenses that cover the 24mm to whatever-mm focal length range at this point. All three of these current lenses are excellent options and the functional differences among them now are the primary basis for selecting one over the others. If you need f/2.8 and are OK with a smaller focal length range and not having IS, the 24-70mm f/2.8 could well be your choice. If you can get along without f/2.8, are OK with the smaller focal length range, would like IS, can make use of semi-macro capabilities and want a smaller lens, then the 24-70mm f/4 IS lens can be a great option. If you don’t need f/2.8,  but do value image stabilization and a significantly larger focal length range, the 24-105 is a wonderful choice. )

(Update 1/8/15: And now there is yet another lens in this general category from Canon, the EF 24-105mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM Lens. I have incorporated some information about this option below.)

Continue reading Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L II vs. 24-70mm f/4L IS vs. 24-105mm f/4 L IS (and more?) →

Equipment, Technique

Yet Another Reason to Like Live View – Shooting in the Wind

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I have posted in the past about some of the advantages of having a live view feature on your camera, especially for the types of photography that I do using my Canon 5DII. This past week I discovered another use, and an unexpected one at that – shooting in conditions of gusty winds.

I most often work from the tripod, and I usually use a pretty large and stable tripod in the context of shooting a full frame DSLR camera. But in some very windy conditions putting the camera on a tripod is not sufficient to stop camera motion and the consequent blur. This is especially a problem when you are shooting in low light or otherwise need to use very long exposure times, and it becomes worse when using long lenses which will catch more wind and magnify vibrations. There are a bunch of tricks that you can try in order to keep the camera steady, but in really strong winds the camera is just going to move, especially if you have a very large lens attached.

One way I try to deal with this is to time my exposures for moments when the wind may momentarily decrease. This can require a lot of patience – sometimes I’ve had to wait several minutes for a very brief halt to the gale, during which I try to make my exposure. But even in this case, you have to make sure that the camera vibration stops completely if you are using a long lens. Ultimately, you have to simply trust that the camera really has stabilized since there is no way to tell directly. Last week, as I was using live view to focus a 400mm lens on a distant subject and again noting that 400mm plus 10x software zoom in live view makes the camera very sensitive to vibration. In the past I have noted this mainly in the context of how darn hard it is to manually focus a big lens this way! But this time it occurred to me that I could use this in my favor.

With the 10x live view magnification enabled, the display is very sensitive to camera motion from the wind. I realized that by leaving the camera in the 10x magnification setup after composing the shot that I could simply watch this display, with its magnification of motion, and wait until the image stabilized during lulls in the wind to take my shots. If the display isn’t bouncing at 10x, motion blur is not going to be an issue. Problem solved. More or less.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.


Deals and Sales, Equipment

Canon Double-Rebates Offer Expiring This Weekend!

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For Canon shooters looking to save a bit of money on certain bodies, lenses, and flashes… the current double rebate offer expires on Saturday, January 8. There are deals on individual items, but if you purchase lenses, etc. with one of several qualifying bodies the “instant rebate” becomes a lot more substantial.