Rainless weather the past few days has been welcome in spite of the humidity, but it hasn’t been great for chasing critters, as they’ve made themselves more scarce than usual. Thinking that switching off to shooting short for a while might be a good idea, I was left wondering: but what?
Here in the ant farm it’s damn near impossible to keep random people out of the frame with anything wider than 180mm. Beyond that, there’s not much that’s aesthetic enough to drive any level of enthusiasm.
Another thought entered the musing, as well: with what lenses? Canon has fairly quickly populated their RF mount with some decent glass, but the more desirable pieces are, IMO, substantially overpriced to take advantage of buyers eager to ditch the EF-RF adapter.
The only practical fast short tele prime is the 85mm f/2, a good value and already in the arsenal. The 85mm f1.2, which sat in my dry cabinet unused previously, is an impractical monster and around 1.5kg deployed–although it is optically spectacular.
There are no less than three ultrawide zooms, all of which are optically almost fisheyes at their wide ends. Two are “L” lenses, priced higher than I’m willing to shell out for an underdesigned lens that relies so heavily on software corrections. The non-L option plus an umbrella seems like a better choice.
The worst is the 100-500mm, which really should be offered at about half what it goes for. No, wait, they should have sorted out the teleconverter issue before they even released it.
So back to where I started, with the superb little 100-400mm and chasing critters. Hey, even when birds are scarce, its size doesn’t spoil the walk!
