For my birthday present and Christmas present, I bought myself another camera lens. A EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM lens. This complements my already existing EF 24-70mm f/2.8L IS lens. I hope to take some birding pictures with it. Since I am a member of Amazon prime, next day shipping is only $4 per item. Pretty cheap given the price of the lens. Also, Canon came out with a rebate program that included this lens. So, I decided to order it. What I was not expecting was just how long it would take to deliver the lens. I waited around my house all day for the delivery person to arrive. So long that I gave up hope. It arrived at 8pm at night! After being “out for delivery” at 6:30am in the morning! Gah! That is not next day air. I am sure that businesses get packages early in the morning when they can actually use them that day. I was reduced to taking a picture of the refrigerator magnets at night. That depth-of-field is razor thin!

In fact, you notice it when using this telephoto lens. By default, the picture that you see through the viewfinder is at maximum aperature of f/2.8. This allows for the brightest picture. But the trade off is that the amount of the picture that is in focus is thin. When you zoom in and out, you can see that thin field moving back and forth.

This lens is also big and heavy. It is almost 8 inches long and weighs 3 1/4 pounds. The lens is so heavy that you mount both the lens and the camera at a balancing point on the lens itself. Which is what alot of people complain about. They prefer the much lighter and cheaper f/4.0 (at 27 ounces). But you loose a full stop of light gathering ability. At an equivalent ISO film speed, your shutter speed will be twice as much.

This lens also has a gyroscope built into it. Which will allow it to be stable at slower shutter speeds. The trade of is a slight loss of image quality as you add more glass elements for the gyroscope bit.

I also bought the Extender EF 2x II. This doubles the focal length of a lens at the cost of 2 f/stops of light gathering power. That water tower is at a 385mm focal length from my back porch.