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Pretty awesome, thanks for asking! :)
I feel like I didn't use it as much as I would have liked this weekend--as mentioned in my weekend update, we didn't do as much as we might have, and Sunday was mainly working around the house, so no photos in there. But I got a few, so consider this both a weekend photo recap and a lens review. :)

This is the set of railroad tracks that carried shuttle parts and probably rocket fuel out to the Kennedy Space Center--so it's not used very much these days. The Hammock Trail paths cross the tracks, and I figured the girls would have fun walking along the rails and checking out the rocks of the track bed. Yep.

9-blade aperture on this lens, so the bokeh seems nice and smooth. I haven't done any critical or scientific sharpness tests, but it's definitely sharper than my old Tamron 28-75mm it's replacing. Not as sharp as my Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS, methinks. But that thing is hella sharp so it's almost not a fair comparison.

Good resistance to chromatic aberrations, I didn't correct for that at all here. I wanted to check its resistance or propensity to flare when shooting into the sun, but didn't get a good chance for that.


Our friend Holly's daughter, Aly. Nice and sharp!

Last night at Crane's Roost. We got there right at sunset, so I tried to get the sun right between them for that hair glow effect. The sun was probably already too low to cause flare, but there's no evidence of it here.

Amy's look here just cracks me up.

One more. :)

There was also a blimp going by overhead when we got there, which was kinda cool!

And a little more bokeh.

Okay, here's where I was really impressed. In DPReview's look at this lens, when testing the VC functionality they reported the (to me) incredible result of usable handheld shots at a full 1-second exposure at 24mm. That's crazy talk. I have fairly steady hands and can typically handhold down to around 1/15s at wide-to-normal focal lengths with decent results--anything less than that is definitely dicey. So the idea of shooting handheld at as much as a second sort of blew my mind, and I had to try it. I took a handful, and this was the best one--and it's not at all bad. If you look at it closely, there's a tiny bit of motion blur, but at this size it looks pretty good. One second! It's a whole new world! :) So I had some fun playing with longish exposures, all handheld:

By this time it was pretty much full-on dark. This shot is 0.8sec at 70mm and f/5.6. Also cropped in pretty heavily, 70mm isn't long enough for the distance at which a heron like this will spook and take off. :)

0.5sec, 24mm and f/5.6.

0.4sec, 70mm and f/2.8.
There's still more to test, but so far I like it a lot, and I got used to the extra weight and differences in operation fairly quickly. I kinda like that the zoom ring is stiff, it makes the zoom lock basically unnecessary, unless it loosens up with time.
I feel like I didn't use it as much as I would have liked this weekend--as mentioned in my weekend update, we didn't do as much as we might have, and Sunday was mainly working around the house, so no photos in there. But I got a few, so consider this both a weekend photo recap and a lens review. :)

This is the set of railroad tracks that carried shuttle parts and probably rocket fuel out to the Kennedy Space Center--so it's not used very much these days. The Hammock Trail paths cross the tracks, and I figured the girls would have fun walking along the rails and checking out the rocks of the track bed. Yep.

9-blade aperture on this lens, so the bokeh seems nice and smooth. I haven't done any critical or scientific sharpness tests, but it's definitely sharper than my old Tamron 28-75mm it's replacing. Not as sharp as my Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS, methinks. But that thing is hella sharp so it's almost not a fair comparison.

Good resistance to chromatic aberrations, I didn't correct for that at all here. I wanted to check its resistance or propensity to flare when shooting into the sun, but didn't get a good chance for that.


Our friend Holly's daughter, Aly. Nice and sharp!

Last night at Crane's Roost. We got there right at sunset, so I tried to get the sun right between them for that hair glow effect. The sun was probably already too low to cause flare, but there's no evidence of it here.

Amy's look here just cracks me up.

One more. :)

There was also a blimp going by overhead when we got there, which was kinda cool!

And a little more bokeh.

Okay, here's where I was really impressed. In DPReview's look at this lens, when testing the VC functionality they reported the (to me) incredible result of usable handheld shots at a full 1-second exposure at 24mm. That's crazy talk. I have fairly steady hands and can typically handhold down to around 1/15s at wide-to-normal focal lengths with decent results--anything less than that is definitely dicey. So the idea of shooting handheld at as much as a second sort of blew my mind, and I had to try it. I took a handful, and this was the best one--and it's not at all bad. If you look at it closely, there's a tiny bit of motion blur, but at this size it looks pretty good. One second! It's a whole new world! :) So I had some fun playing with longish exposures, all handheld:

By this time it was pretty much full-on dark. This shot is 0.8sec at 70mm and f/5.6. Also cropped in pretty heavily, 70mm isn't long enough for the distance at which a heron like this will spook and take off. :)

0.5sec, 24mm and f/5.6.

0.4sec, 70mm and f/2.8.
There's still more to test, but so far I like it a lot, and I got used to the extra weight and differences in operation fairly quickly. I kinda like that the zoom ring is stiff, it makes the zoom lock basically unnecessary, unless it loosens up with time.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-05 07:21 pm (UTC)