Nude Photo Pro

For many years 99% of my professional photography was all done using a Hasselblad and I still think they are beautiful cameras. I have a great deal of respect not only for the equipment they make but also some of the people I have spoken to who work at the company.

There are various jobs though which can be done very well using a good DSLR and my current weapon of choice is the Canon 1DsII. Yes I know there is a new 5DII and even a 1DsIII, but the fact is that I am happy with what I have and don’t want to upgrade my camera just for the sake of it every time a new camera appears on the market. Before the days of digital, this was how most photographers felt and while there was a case for regular upgrades when digital first emerged, I am not so sure that point of view is 100% valid anymore. You can do an awful lot with 17MP.

For about ten years all my Canon lenses were primes and I was pretty happy with them on the whole. Certainly I never had a client complain about the sharpness of any images. When I switched over to digital though and in particular when I started using a full frame camera the terrible curse of sensor dust reared its ugly head and it became clear that changing lenses outdoors every three minutes was not only a pain in the neck, but also likely to cause real problems with a dirty sensor, so that was when I started to look around for a decent zoom.

I had read lots of reports about the Tamron 28-75 F2.8 being a real bargain offering similar quality to the Canon L series zooms, but for a fraction of the price, so I bought one and used it quite successfully on a glamour shoot I did in Prague. The lens was then put away for quite some time and rarely used, but one day I decided to pick it out of the bag and run some tests. It quickly became clear that the lens wasn’t focusing properly and unfortunately for me it was now just out of warranty… the lens was sent back to Tamron in the UK for an adjustment repair costing me about £60 and it took them several weeks to complete.

At first all seemed well, but then a few months later I saw that the focus had shifted again, however now it was doing something really strange which looked to me like one of the lens elements wasn’t sitting in its proper position. This was one of those moments when you lose faith in a piece of equipment and I just didn’t feel able to trust that lens anymore.

Message to Tamron: You need to improve your quality control!

The problem was that by now I was really hooked on the convenience of zooms and had already seen that they are capable of good results, so I looked around and eventually felt that the Canon 24-105L would be a good move. It hasn’t disappointed. The build quality of this lens is beautiful as you would expect from an L series and the image stabilisation feature is just amazing, since it allows you to work hand held at really slow shutter speeds. I have taken sharp pictures hand held on 105mm at just 1/6th of a second. This would be impossible with any normal lens.

Being completely objective about the 24-105L, it’s definitely a little soft on the edges at the 24mm end until stopped down, but I rarely work like that and perhaps it’s not quite as sharp at 105mm as it is at 85mm. Overall though, I think it’s been a fantastic purchase and I find very few occasions now when there is any real justification for using another lens.

After all those years of only using fixed lenses the performance I am seeing was quite an eye opener. In direct tests against my Canon primes the 24-105 was notably sharper than my 28mm and a little better than the 35mm lens at just about any aperture from centre to edge. It’s pretty much identical to the 50mm and you certainly wouldn’t see the difference in print. Yes it’s true this lens isn’t exactly cheap but if you add up the cost of the fixed lenses it replaces, the value is far easier to understand.

Canon 24-105L

Compared to the 85mm lens, which I always considered to be a real gem, I was astonished to see that the zoom showed sharper edges at F4, however, they were essentially pretty much identical thereafter. The zoom also has the advantage of closer focussing for portraits at that focal length. As much as I love my 85mm, apart from the slightly faster servo focus speed when following fast moving subjects, there is no real reason to favour this lens over the zoom. Only the 100mm macro is notably sharper than the zoom at the same focal length and I have basically identified that the 24-105 appears weakest at both the widest and longest focal length.

As for flare I have yet to find an example on a single image, even following tests where I pointed the lens straight up at the sky and where lenses such as the 50mm were clearly exhibiting flare. This is astonishing considering the size of that front element and all the compromises which normally have to be made when building a zoom.

Perhaps I have just been super lucky with this zoom but I am now using it for just about everything and find it both incredibly useful and versatile. The only area where I have noticed a weakness with the 24-105L comes from fairly common chromatic aberration, which I don’t see with the primes, but this has always been very easy to rectify inside ACR when Raw processing. The image which you see on the nude front cover image of my book was shot with this lens.

Edit: 20th November 2009

Since there has been quite a lot if interest in this subject I have decided to produce a small series of updates showing the side by side comparisons that I shall update over the next few days. Click on the links below to see the tests you are interested in.

The 24-105L v 28mm F2.8

The 24-105 v 35mm F2.0

An afterthought: I recommend B&H Photo if you are interested in this lens.