Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Photography advice

There are certainly less expensive Canon lenses of similar caliber. I'm looking into the Canon F4.0 70-200 L lens, myself. That's only about $600.

Heh.

Only.

I think one issue overlooked is the fact that going with a prime lens rather than a combo lens, you lose a lot of your ability to compose a shot. Sure you can "enlarge" the file (crop and resize) but that loses some of the effective area of the CCD. For instance a 28-70 combo lens (35mm, I'm not good at figuring out digital lenses in mm, sorry!) may only get you a step back to a step forward in framing over a 50mm prime, but sometimes that's enough to keep you from falling into the pool, or backing into some steroid monkey.

Bren R.

I have that lens (70-200mm f/4) and it's fantastic. Sharp, sharp, sharp! Of course, I'd love to get the f/2.8 IS version, but it's twice as expensive, plus a lot heavier.

That said, for indoor sports you would have to hope for either a really well lit place, bump the ISO up to at least 800 and/or use flash for f/4 to be fast enough at 200mm.

That is a disadvantage, but at the same time you usual gain noticeably in image quality and light gathering capability. And digital makes it a lot easier to crop pics how you'd like them.

Well lit, as in industrial spotlights used as ambient lighting...

I'm trying to see if a friend of mine will let his 70-200 go. He wants a Sigma 50-500 (!)

This Sigma is a recently updated version of one that I have been extremely happy with. Actually, at the moment, I have three Sigmas that I'm extremely happy with: The linked 70-200F/2.8 above, a 24-70 F/2.8, and a 12-24mm.

Gentlemen, again, thank you. I am learning a lot, and you are making that process both efficient and enjoyable.

What I hear you saying is, if one of my primary goals is to adequately photograph indoor sports, I need a $700 camera and an $850 lens. Ouch. Not gonna happen at this time.

Could I get away with something like an 85mm f/1.8 and then cropping virtually everything I shoot? Or is that lens overly specialized to have as an investment? Does adding a tele-converter to something like that make any sense?

Is the downside to using something like the f/4 200mm and stepping up the ISO to 800 (or even 1600) that I will get unacceptably higher amounts of noise?

It sounds like buying the best 70-200mm zoom I can afford is a practical approach, but I'm concerned that getting something like the inexpensive f/4-5.6 that Mark linked earlier may not help me at all.

You guys weren't kidding about the lenses being the expensive part. Photography makes Home Theatre look like a cheap hobby.

Pity that some of us are cursed with both as hobbies...

Have you considered sitting at the bottom of the pool with an underwater camera?

at Hef's place?