After over a year of waiting and much debate, I decided to order a Canon 135 f/2l lens. Being primarily a landscape/wildlife photographer, this lens wasn’t on anywhere close to my future purchase shortlist (I was holding out for a 17 or 24 tilt/shift) for quite a while. Reviews of this lens are nothing short of rave. On every merchant website I visited this lens never scored below a 4 out of 5 and the vast majority of those reviews were 5s. I have never seen any product that didn’t have at least 1 bad review since usually, there’s one or two people out there ready to throw out a bad review for any little thing. This lens had none of that and there were literally hundreds of reviews.
So what were the main motivating factors that pushed me towards this lens?
- As my portraiture kept picking up, I needed a lens with a fast autofocus (lots of fast kids).
- Compatibility with Canon teleconverters, both the 1.4x and 2x support autofocus on all Canon cameras (making it a 189 f/2.8 and a 270 f/4 lens).
- I needed a lens that allowed me to capture a greater rate of in-focus photographs in lower light.
The 135 arrived on Friday so I spent the weekend field testing it. As I am not into photographing brick walls, looking at charts, or studying diagrams I am going to include my subjective thoughts and observations into today’s posts. If you need charts and graphs, feel free to look at the hundreds of sites dedicated to that. Frankly, it gives me a headache and keeps me from shooting.
I’ll begin by what I expected. Since this lens is at the top of every portrait photographer’s list and is recognized for its sharpness, I expected to receive a lens that was sharp, provides a good working distance between my subject and I, and gave excellent bokeh, color, and contrast. When I finally had it in my hand and attached to a camera I found that I was wrong on 4 counts. The lens is extremely sharp, has incredible bokeh, fabulous color, and phenomenal contrast. In short, the lens exceeded my every expectation (well, except my working distance one, I guess, but how do you improve on that?).
Next, I’ll mention how it compares to what I already own. In the normal and short to long telephoto arena I currently own a 70-200 f/4l (Non-IS), 300 f/4l (IS), and a 50mm compact macro lens. The “fastest” lens I had owned previously was the 50 which opened up to 2.5. This lens gives me some great depth-of-field, and it has some good bokeh associated, but the autofocus is horrendous and the working distance was a tad close. The lens is primarily meant to be a macro lens with the primary mode of focus being manual so it often hunts to obtain focus. This makes this “fast” lens not so fast when it comes to snapping portraits, especially of constantly moving children.
My 300 f/4l focuses quickly and was my sharpest lens. Not great as a general-purpose human portrait lens (as opposed to animal portrait), but it has great bokeh. This was the sharpness benchmark that I expected the 135 to exceed.
The 70-200 f/4l covers the 135 focal range and was the primary reason I held off on purchasing this lens for so long. I have owned this lens longer than any other and I use it frequently for portraits. The focus is fairly snappy, however, this lens lacked when it came to focusing inside and was not as fast as I needed more often than I was willing to admit.
Finally, I’m going to post some photos. These exemplify the beauty of this lens. My focus rate was extremely high and I used various focus points. Really, I felt like I was holding a whole new camera, the autofocus was that fast! The sharpness of the lens and the way that the rest of the image melts away from the area in focus is simply superb. All photos below were taken with a Canon 5d (Original flavor) and 135 f/2l.
Taken at f/2.5
Taken at f/2.5
Taken at f/2.8
Taken at f/2.5
Taken at f/2.5
Frankly, this lens begs to be used at wide-open apertures. I never saw myself stopping down beyond about f/3.2, except for a test. If you have any reservations about this lens, cancel them now and order.
As a side note, when I was researching this lens, many forums discussed the benefits of placing the 1.4x extender on this lens, but there were no examples, so I will be discussing that aspect of this lens in tomorrow’s post.
