Canon 600mm f/4 L - First Day

This weekend is my birthday, and as a present to myself, I rented a Canon 600mm f/4 super telephoto lens from borrowlenses.com to play with over the weekend.

Snow Goose

Canon 7D, 1/1250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 400

This is an extremely large lens, weighing in at 12 pounds (see below), but also provides incredible magnification. My goal over this weekend was to have a little fun shooting wildlife at our local wildlife refuges.

© 2011 Scott Jungling

Unfortunately, this is also Tule fog season, Tule fog is a dense ground fog that can persist for days or even weeks, and has been the source of many chain reaction car accidents. And today was - unfortunately - the first solid day of Tule fog this year.

But I didn't let that stop me from heading out to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge south of Willows to see what I could do despite the weather. I attached it to my Canon 7D camera, giving the lens an effective focal length of 960mm.

Considering the dense freezing fog, I think I did pretty well. There were a lot of birds out and the large objective element on the lens gathered enough light despite the fog to allow some very nice exposures. Here's a sample:

Northern Shovelers
Canon 7D, 1/1500 sec., f/6.3, ISO 800

White-fronted Geese
Canon 7D, 1/1600 sec., f6/3, ISO 800

Marsh Hawk

Canon 7D, 1/800 sec., f/6.3, ISO 800

Marsh Hawk

Canon 7D, 1/1600 sec., f/6.3, ISO 800

Snow Goose

Canon 7D, 1/500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 400

My initial impressions of the lens are that it's very useful for specific things, but amazingly unwieldy. It's very difficult to maneuver. Even propping it on the window sill of the car requires a lot of work and effort. However, the image quality is incredible. I'd love to own this lens, but at $8000, it's a bit rich for my blood. For now, I'll stick to renting.