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Zoo Zoom (Or, fun with my new lens) October 3, 2006

So, after talking about it for nearly a year, I finally added a telephoto lens to my camera playset. This one, the EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. The longest focal length I had on my other lenses was 110mm, and that really wasn't enough to let me shoot right up someone's left nostril from a safe distance. I came very close to buying one of those fancy L-series lenses, which are absurdly overpriced and scream LOOK AT ME! I'M A H4RDC0R3 PH070GR4PH3R!, but I eventually decided that I wanted more focal length (i.e., more zooming) than the only one in my price range. And more importantly I wanted image stabilization. As far as I can tell, lenses with image stabilization have teams of tiny imps inside them. Whenever you focus on something, they all get to work and counter-jiggle the glass guts of the thing so that your pictures don't look like the camera was held by a meth addict quitting cold turkey.

So as I mentioned in Sam's last update, I went to the zoo to test the thing out. I figured wild animals fit the bill of "want to take picture of, but can't get that close to" and thus made excellent subjects to try this sucker out. Here are my two favorite pictures from that (click for larger versions):

Pretty good zooming. I'm sure that the groundhog would have ripped my throat out if I had tried to get close enough for that shot with a wide angle lens. But what I was really impressed with was the image stabilization. These shots of the sea lion show were taken from my seat in the bleachers, zoomed in to 300mm or so:

I'd zoom in and the image would be shaking and jittering around, yet when I pressed the button to focus the image stabilizing imps would jump up and make it almost rock solid. Combined with ample light, I got a nice crisp image. I haven't played with it much in low light yet, but I plan on experimenting with that next.

Just for fun, here's another picture of that bear, along with what Wikipedia tells me is his natural predator:

And finally that chipmunk and the leopard with whom he forged an unlikely but powerful friendship after being lost at sea for 100 straight days (in my version of events):