I recently had the opportunity
to put my
Canon 500mm f/4L IS lens through its paces
while shooting white-tail deer in the Big Meadows
area of Shenandoah National Park. I arrived at some
subjective and objective conclusions that may help
you if you are considering purchasing this lens.
The Canon 500mm lens is simply
one of the sharpest optics in existence today. I
consider it in many ways to be the perfect lens for
shooting wildlife: it gives you great reach for
distant subjects, is sufficiently light for hand
holding when necessary, and with a maximum aperture
of f4 you can still achieve high shutter speeds in
low light. It is also relatively compact and more
portable than other heavier "super telephoto"
lenses, so you can easily take it to many great
photo destinations.
Optically speaking, the
500mm is so sharp you can shave with it! This lens
is as sharp as they get, corner to corner, even wide
open (it gets even better stopped down to f5.6 or
f8). Simple resolution tests alone do not do the
lens justice. I once tested this lens against the
superlative
Sigma 300-800mm
zoom, and concluded that both lenses where of
roughly equal optical quality. Field results,
however, tell a somewhat different story. The Canon
lens has an almost 3-D quality to it that is
revealed when shooting real subjects, a result of
its superb contrast and color rendition. Although I
think the Sigma lens is incredible (especially
considering that it is a zoom lens), I believe the
Canon optic is a step up. This lens also mates very
well with the
Canon 1.4x Teleconverter,
with very little loss of optical quality (in my
opinion, this combination outperforms the Sigma
300-800mm at the equivalent focal length).
There is some minor
vignetting at f4 on full frame cameras, but nothing
that can't be easily fixed in post processing.
Backgrounds are rendered pleasingly out-of-focus by
this lens when shot wide open. The auto focus is
incredible: the focus does not move, it dances
back and forth with great speed and accuracy. This
lens also features a focus limiter, which prevents
the auto focus from hunting throughout its full
range, a very nice feature indeed. The image
stabilization (IS) is of course top notch (Canon,
after all, is the pioneer of this technology in SLR
lenses), allowing hand-held shooting in low
light situations.
I can't say anything bad
about this lens. It is superbly constructed,
weather-sealed, and it performs better than any
other optic I have ever laid hands on. Price-wise,
however, it is not for the faint-hearted! New, these
lenses run about $5,800, but can sometimes be found
used for less.
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