My friend had a trip to the US, and I used this opportunity to get me this great Canon lens, which I have been dreaming about for quite some time!

As you might have already guessed this is a Canon 70-200 f4 L-series lens. This is the cheapest one from this line of Canon lenses, f4, without image stabilizer. I bought it at B&H for about 630USD and had it shipped to the address my friend was staying at.

The telephoto lens I used before was Canon 75-300 f4-5.6 III USM, given to me as a present. I have enjoyed that lens for about two years, but eventually its lack of sharpness and overall image quality comparing to my other lenses started to bother me a great deal. After doing a little research, I came up with this Canon 70-200 f4 L lens. After reading tons of reviews and watching photos made with this lens I was convinced that it had very good sharpness and image quality, and though I was loosing a 200 to 300 mm range compared to my old lens, I decided to go for it.

There are also much more expensive variations of this lens – f4 with image stabilizer, which goes at B&H at about 1200USD (!!!) and there is also Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS L (1800USD). All these models are far beyond my financial capability, but I have to say that even if I could afford them, I am not sure at all that I would buy them.

This is something that has to be explained.  When you look for a lens, first of all you ask yourself what are you going to shoot with it? In my case it is landscapes, portraits, and studio photography.

• When I shoot landscapes I mostly use a tripod anyway, so I don’t need that additional f-stop for quicker shutter speeds. In addition when shooting landscapes smaller apertures are used anyway.
• When I shoot portraits and studio, I either do it in daylight, which is bright enough for f4, or I use flashes, and their power and position can also be adjusted for working with f4 and smaller apertures.
• The more expensive Canon 70-200 models have also one disadvantage – weight: the f2.8 IS model weights about one 1.5 kilos (!) and the f4 IS model weights 760 gr, while f4 without image stabilizer (the one that I bought) weights 700 gr. The weight is very important when you are hiking with your photo gear, and also when you are holding camera in your hand for a long time.

As you can see currently I have no real need for the more expensive models, but what is important that Canon 70-200 f4 L – is an L-series lens, which means that it has L-series optical components, and the image quality it produces is the same (if not better due to its simpler build) as its more expensive modifications.

You might ask “but who does need those expensive models?”. Well I can think of a few reasons – for example birds photographers really need that lens-speed, or indoor sports photographers – there are many occasions in which they can’t use flashes, but have to shoot quickly moving subjects.

Enough about my choices. What about the lens itself? I will not write a full review here, at least not just yet, but I will share my first impression with you.

I am very happy with it. The build quality is superb, the lens sits good in my hand and the focus ring is very comfortable. The image quality is top-notch. The sharpness is the best I had so far, and the colors are stunning. This lens looks heavier and bulkier than it actually is, and it comes with its own original lens hood. The focusing process is almost silent and pretty quick. One disadvantage of this lens is that its filter size is 67mm and not 77mm like most of the L-series lenses, so I will have to buy an additional polarizing filter for it.

Enough words for this post, here are a couple of photos I made using the Canon 70-200 f4 L lens, and as always comments and critiques are welcome!

Ahula Reserve . Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Family Vacation. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Watch Your Step… Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

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During our vacation in Prague me and Ira also visited a small town near Prague named Kutná Hora. At first I didn’t think of writing second chapter about my trip, but when I finally had time to browse through my photos from that town, I saw that I had a few very nice photos from there (if I won’t compliment myself on my photographs, then who will ? ), so I decided to write a short post on our day in that sweet little town.

Kutna Hora is about an hour train ride from Prague, and if you, like me, don’t like organized trips, you can just buy a train ticket in Prague and visit it by yourself. The old town centre is about 20 minutes walk from the train station, and I think there is even a bus going from the station to town. Anyway we didn’t use any kind of transportation but our feet.

Alley leading to St. Barbara Church. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

There are quite a few tourist attractions in Kutna Hora, such as St. Barbara Church, which is one of the most famous Gothic churches in central Europe. It is also a UNESCO world heritage site. By the way St. Barbara is the patron saint of miners, and this town was mostly based on silver mines in the past. Another attraction of the town is the Sedlec Ossuary. It is a small Roman Catholic chapel. Its’ main feature is that inside it is artistically “decorated” by many real human bones. It is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 to 70,000 people.

In addition it is pure pleasure just to walk the streets of the old town centre in Kutna Hora. This is what we did the most – just walking on the narrow streets between old buildings and taking photos, of course! When we got there it was rainy-misty weather. It was pretty dark for photographing, but I had my tripod with me, and all the photos that you see here were shot from tripod. Yes, even the dog in the last photograph!

St. Barbara Church Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Actually I was surprised that I could use my tripod just about anywhere. Nobody told me that I couldn’t, which was strange because I am used from other places in Europe (Greece for example) that in most touristy places they don’t let you use the tripod. Shooting in mist I tried to convey this darkish and melancholic atmosphere. But it was not the case with these rose hips. Here I aimed at showing the “freshness” of the branch and the “coolness” of the air. I was captivated by the color of the hips!

Rose hips in the rain. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

When photographing tourist attractions such as Sedlec Ossuary (which you can see below), I wanted my photos to be different from what most tourist were shooting (which is just straight-forward showing of what eye sees). So I tried to include elements that would add mood, which in my opinion was appropriate. In case of the Ossuary I went around it several times until I found this spot where the tree branches looked like they were reaching towards the building and blending nicely into the seamless gray sky.

Sedlec Ossuary. Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

During our visit, there were not many people on the streets. Here and there we met tourists, but I was looking for local people to “put” in my frame, to make my photos more authentic. In the left photo below I succeeded, while in the right one I waited and waited for someone to pass by, but with no luck, and finally shot the scene without anyone. It is a shame, I would really like to have there a person or two.

Kutna Hora old town streets. Photographs by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

On our way back to the train station, we were walking on a narrow sidewalk when I spotted this dog watching us from behind a window. Even though we had little time left till the train I couldn’t just pass by this photo opportunity. The thing is that it was getting dark already, and even high ISO wouldn’t help me out here. So even for this shot I had to take out my tripod. The doggy was watching intensely all my actions and at some point I thought, that’s it now it will start barking… but everything was just fine – I took a few shots and we took off to catch our train.

I hope you liked the photographs, and as always – comments and critiques are welcome!

The Doggy . Photograph by Greg Brave. Click on the photo to enlarge.

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Good day everyone!

So, here I am, a week after that me and Ira got back from our vacation in Prague. We had a great time there. All the holidays mood, and the celebration of the new year really lifted our spirits. But in addition to sight-seeing I also photographed quite a lot. I brought tripod because I knew that I wanted to get night and early morning shots of Prague, and especially the Vltava, the big river flowing through the city. It turned out that tripod helped me a lot on different occasions since the weather in Prague during our visit wasn’t sunny, and sometimes, even during daytime when I wanted to shoot with small apertures (f8 – f16) I really needed it. I got to shoot landscapes both in rain and in snow, and during that weather Ira had to work hard and hold an umbrella above me, my camera and tripod while I was having fun composing and shooting pictures.

Thanks to the rain, I got the luck to shoot St. Vitt Cathedral with a real wet-floor effect! I mean that the whole area in front of the cathedral was wet and cathedral reflected beautifully. Of course without a tripod such shots would be practically impossible. We also got up pretty early (not too early, since the sunrise was at about eight o’clock) and went shooting on Vltava. It was a great experience for me as I tried to shoot panoramas, encountered some problems, and solved them. I probably will talk about it in another post.

For those of you who never had the chance to shoot in cold weather, my best advice is – wear gloves! You know, the gloves that cover your fingers halfway so you can still operate the camera.

A few words about the equipment that I took with me. I didn’t have a good telephoto lens, so I took only two lenses – Canon 10-22mm and Canon 24-70mm f2.8, which are my best lenses. I wish I had a good telephoto lens such as canon 70-200 f4L, but I didn’t, therefore in my photos you won’t see many closeups. And, of course I took my camera, Canon 40D. By the way I also had polarizing filters, but since most of the time the weather was really cloudy I didn’t use them even once. It is a good thing that I took spare batteries. If you didn’t know, in live-view mode batteries get eaten very quickly, and I mean VERY quickly! And I use live-view mode pretty often, especially when I shoot from awkward angles that make it difficult to look through the viewfinder.

And finally if you would like to see more of my trip results photography-wise, you can see it in the slide-show that I made. Here is how I suggest to watch this slide-show:

Click on the link below to go to the slide-show, then click on the lower right button in the slideshow to go to full screen mode, then turn on your speakers, and finally click on the play button. The whole slideshow takes about seven minutes (depending on your internet connection speed).

I really hope that it worth your time, and feel free to comment on the photos!

Prague Slideshow by Greg Brave

 

 

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