A Second Canon Lens

The second of two used Canon lenses I had purchased arrived the other night and I had a chance to wander outside this morning to see how well it works on my Sony camera body. Unfortunately, this second Canon lens is not nearly as fast at autofocusing as the first Canon lens I had purchased a few days ago so I'm a bit disappointed. I was hoping this lens would help resolve some of my longer telephoto woes but now I'm not so sure. 

I'm definitely keeping that first lens that I played with the other day to use for landscapes, architecture, cityscapes, and maybe even some indoor wide angle photography. This telephoto lens... I don't know... I'm still undecided.

The photos are contrasty and sharp which is quite impressive for such an inexpensive lens but the autofocus is so slow on my Sony camera body that I know it would be too slow for its intended purpose... wildlife photos. I don't need blazingly fast autofocus but I do need reasonably fast... acceptable... even decent speed. This autofocus is as slow as trying to manually focus and sometimes even slower. If I'm going to manually focus, then I'd might as well buy a long prime manual focus lens for about the same price as this autofocus lens cost me (autofocus lenses are far more expensive than manual focus lenses).

Then again, when I look at the photos I shot today... I'm impressed and I feel as though I shouldn't complain. There is no other lens even close to this price range which reaches as far as this lens... and it really is rather sharp too. 

My options really are quite limited when it comes to telephoto lenses so I plan to take my time before making a decision. The image quality I am getting at these longer focal lengths is the best I have ever shot... if only the autofocus was faster...


Post Edit:  I wrote the above critique last night and it is now the following morning. I had some time to think and I played around with using the lens in manual focus mode. 

I have to say that my Sony camera body makes manual focus quite easy and fairly quick. I had no problems manually focusing on objects in dim light. More importantly, I was able to do this within a second or two. This might be a major factor I need to consider when choosing some long telephoto or long prime lenses. At least I know that I could resort to using manual focus to get the shot I need. Combine that with the sharpness of this lens and I think it would be silly to send this lens back at this point.

I also realized that I could rent that more expensive Canon lens which will allow me to test out that lens on my camera body before buying. I could also rent a different autofocus adapter to try. 

I'm definitely going to do this... I'll rent a different autofocus adapter and that longer prime lens to see how well they work with my Sony camera body. I could test this lens with the second autofocus adapter and I could test the rented lens on both autofocus adapters (the one I currently own and the one I will rent). This rental option makes me feel a lot better.

I have two other options to try beyond this option so... one step at a time. 

This lens shoots some sharp long telephoto images though! These photos, below, were all shot using autofocus... a Canon EF mount 70-300mm lens... on a Sony FE mount body... autofocus was accurate but quite slow... too slow for any wildlife, unfortunately...

The last photo, below, was shot late last night as I was playing around with manual focus... it was a very dim room... and I was still able to manually focus quickly with this lens, moving from object to object at different distances... I shot at the longest focal length, 300mm, f5.6, 1/125 sec, and ISO 12,800... This is pretty impressive to get such clean results (the other photos were as consistently impressive) while manually focusing as quickly as possible in such a dark room.

This is really making me think that I could get away with using a much less expensive manual focus lens rather than an autofocus lens.



Post Post Edit:  I quickly noticed another problem with this particular lens... the aperture wasn't showing correctly in the camera when I zoomed beyond around 260mm. I eventually realized that my biggest issue wasn't with the lenses... or my camera... it was the auto-focus adapter. I returned the Fotodiox Fusion adapter I had originally purchased and purchased a Metabones IV adapter instead. It turns out that these Canon lenses work just fine on my Sony a7 when I am using the Metabones adapter!