March 13th, 2012:
The most recent loan from Canon Professional Services was the 400mm f/4 DO IS, definitely not a lens I would bring along to a wedding or engagement shoot – but it’s spectacular if you have the back seat of a car to store it in on a road trip and want to capture some wildlife. When we took this along on our recent road trip to Sequoia, Yosemite and the Pacific Coast Highway, that’s exactly what this giant piece of glass did – sat on the back seat of the car with a camera attached. Felicia and I could whip it out and snap away from the front seat of the car whenever we spotted wildlife on the roadside (usually using the door for support).
Once I started reviewing the images on the back of the camera I quickly realized that sharpness at f/4 this is awful and it really only starts getting better at f/5 or f/5.6. At f/4 there are horrible amounts of ghosting and an unreasonable amount of softness to the lens. Thus after the first few days with this beast that is where the aperture stayed – at f/5.6 (kind of sad to lose an entire stop, but I wasn’t happy with the pictures otherwise). To have a wasted f-stop on a $6000 lens is kind of a massive fail on Canons part. I loved the reach of this lens and if I decided to get heavy into nature or sports photography I would consider the 400mm range, but I would probably never own this model. It works great in daylight, but it’s failings show quickly as the sun starts to fade.
Still it’s fun to use a focal length that you’d otherwise never shoot with.
This is a pretty massive lens, weighing in at almost 4 and a half pounds, in order to get a steady shot you need to use a monopod/tripod or fence/elbow/wrist combo as Felicia did for the next few pictures. Also, the strap we ended up using was attached to the lens instead of the camera – I really didn’t feel like snapping the lens mount out of my camera.
In one line – great reach to shoot things far away, but an unacceptable level of sharpness at f/4. Not for me.
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