I treated myself to a new lens recently, and have been itching to try it out. I finally got the opportunity to grab a few shots with it, and am seriously impressed with the performance.
First of all, I should say that this isn’t a lens for the faint-hearted. It’s heavy (about 1.4kg), long (about 20cm), and quite tricky to hold steady at full magnification. However, some of the wonderful background bokeh effects that are possible at wide apertures at 200mm make it all worthwhile.
Many of these images were shot at 200mm, with the aperture wide open at f2.8. The picture of the hen and the picture of the leaf demonstrate the level of bokeh that can be achieved when shooting at this focal length, close to the subject. The dark background on the leaf picture is actually the bottom of the garden, but the shallow lens has totally smoothed it out.
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