Fun with Canon 100-400 lens

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Marsha/CA

Marsha/CA

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We are camped at Cattail Cove south of Lake Havasu and I've been playing with my camera lens.  I have along way to go; but am having lots of fun.

Here are a few photos.  They are not all that great, but it lets me know what this lens can do.  The duck was across the inlet; and the hummingbird was probably 1,000 feet away up in the top of a tree.

Marsha~
 

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If you have a Canon Rebel EOS you might want to take a look at the Tamron 18-270mm with image stabilization.  It's a sweet package that eliminate having to change lenses over a huge range.  It's surprisingly affordable.
 
They also make the same lens for Sony but it is a waste of money. Sony has image stabilization built into the body so it is not needed in the lens. For Sony you can get a Sigma 18-250 for $399 or a Tamron 28-300 for $419 new or used for $290. Image stabilization in body is one of my main reasons for switching to Sony. Lenses are much cheaper and every lens you put on the camera has IS. The Tamron 18-270 is $649.
 
Congratulations on the new lens Marsha. That lens for my Canon DSLR is a bit rich for me and, for my PAS style of picture taking, I could upgrade my Canon SX20 to the Canon SX50 with a 24-1200mm lens for about a third of the price of the 100-400mm lens. Of course, they're not the same animal, and Canon has the ISO limited in this camera. But, as I say, probably good enough for my PAS style.
 
Tom, I think it would be a waste of money for you to upgrade to the SX50. You would need a tripod for anything over 600. And the image quality would really suck at the extreme zooms. Also it is a very slow lens, so you would have to crank up the ISO just to use it at extreme zooms and that degrades the image. (ISO is the sensitivity of the camera. Increasing ISO to make up for loss of light creates grain.) And overall the image quality of your camera is just as good as that of the SX50.  The SX20 is still a great camera.
 
Thanks Tom. That's the conclusion I was coming to, without the technical rationale you provided.
 
BTW Marsha's message and photos did cause me to pull my virtually-unused Rebel DSLR out of the closet. That's when I went to amazon.com and got sticker shock, and started looking at other options. If I was a serious photographer with more photographic  knowledge and skill, buying expensive lenses might make more sense for me. Looks like I need to stick with PAS  :(
 
Yes, Canon lenses are very expensive. That is mainly because Canon uses the in lens image stabilization system. Every time you buy a lens you by IS. For example, the Canon 70-200 L lens costs $565 without IS and costs $915 with IS. Sony uses in body IS which means you only buy the IS once and every lens you buy has IS.

I have been at Disney World the last two weeks and as always I notice what others are shooting. Five years ago DSLRs were dominant and P&S were the second most dominant camera used. However there were a lot more P&S than DSLRs, but most people keep their P&S in their pocket or purse when they are not being used so they are harder to spot. Camera phones and bridge cameras were a rarity then.

Now camera phones are far and away the dominant camera. P&S are very rare to see because a cell phone is just about as good and it saves having to carry another device with you. DSLRs and bridge cameras seem about equal now. So in total the number of DSLRs have been dropping as the marketplace wises up to the fact that a DSLR is massive overkill for most photographers.
 
Aye, the landscape has certainly changed. Not too many years ago we were supplying chips to all the digital camera manufacturers. I owned several Sony cameras, but became convinced that the companies who'd survive in the ever-growing digital camera market would be the ones who had good optics and acquired the electronics expertise, not the other way around. At that time, they would have been the traditional SLR  camera manufacturers, including Canon and Nikon.

I rarely use the camera on my phone. I've often got my SX20 with me and, if I know I'm going to be snapping some shots, it's the first thing to go in the car. It's quite visible, as it's usually out of its case and in one hand, waiting for that 'Kodak moment'. Chris OTOH uses the camera on her iPhone extensively. I'd bought her several purse-sized PAS cameras over the years, but she'd either leave them at home or wouldn't bother to take them out of her purse. The camera phone changed that for her.
 
Canon and Nikon were and are the industry leaders due to their SLR days. Sony is in third place in the DSLR market. They had to cheat to get there. Sony bought Minolta/Konica 7 years ago. Not for the name Minolta, but for the A mount. Sony uses the A mount in the DSLR/SLT cameras. The advantage for buying the A mount was the fact that Minolta had been making A mount lenses for 20 years. By putting the image stabilization in the body that meant that any old Minolta lens would work just fine in any Sony A camera. And every lens would be image stabilized. This meant they didn't have to come out with a whole bunch of lenses when they launched their DSLR line of cameras. They were hoping this would attract buyers in large numbers. This has never happened because Sony doesn't advertise their cameras very much especially in comparison to Canikon.

Another interesting observation at Disney World. Five years ago Canon seemed to be the dominant DSLR but now it seems like Nikon is the dominant DSLR. Not a scientific observation for sure, but that is what I have noticed. I hardly ever see a Sony DSLR and I only saw one Olympic DSLR and zero Pentax DSLRs. Those are the only five companies that sell DSLRs.
 
I found out about the Minolta acquisition when, during a Moab rally a few years ago, half my Minolta PAS pics were washed out due to light getting in past the lens. I tried to get support, and Sony said "you're on your own; We're not supporting Minolta products". Sony also deserted customers who bought their (Sony's, not Minolta's) Palm-compatible products. Those two experiences left a distaste for anything Sony, although they make excellent products.

FWIW I still have two Minolta film SLR cameras in the closet; They haven't been used in a long time. Some of the best shots I ever took were from a speeding bullet train in Japan in the 70's, using my first SLR, a Minolta I'd just bought in Hong Kong. I had no idea what I was doing, and click, clicked away; I didn't see the results until I had the film processed a couple of weeks later in the UK.
 
My first SLR was also a Minolta. I bought a Minolta SRT-101 in black in 1969. But it had a problem with 1/1000th of a second, the top half of the frame was darker than the bottom half. So I traded it in a year later on a Nikon F. Now there was a brute of a camera. I used it for 25 years before switching to digital.
 
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