Wait a minute, Mr. Postman!
Is there a package, a package for me, eh?
Last year’s company performance results are in… Looks like we did okay… Apparently my contribution has been recognized as well; hence, a little bit of a reward showed up on my last paycheck. Just in time :) I got tired of drooling over the 70-200 VR and decided to go for it. I figured, I’ll never get over it unless I try it out myself. I decided to buy it on ebay, that way I can should be able to resell it and recover most of money, in case if this lens does not meet my expectations. And my expectations are:
1) It has to have awesome bokeh
2) It has to be crispy sharp
3) It has to be vividly colorful
4) It has to be fast, fast, fast!
I’ve been monitoring this lens on ebay for the last few weeks, and watched few of them going for well over $1400, which kind of surprised me, because for an extra $150-200 you could get yourself a brand new version of it…. Anyways, after few attempts and few unsuccessful bids, I finally managed to steal this particular one just for under $1,300…
And it finally arrived! First thing that pleasantly surprised me - it’s not THAT big and even though IS somewhat heavy, I can definitely lug it around more/less comfortably (or so it seems :) Since it’s a used lens, I carefully inspected optics and was happy to find out that the lens appears to be in an excellent shape. It does appear that it’s been used most of its life with a UV filter on and there are very few signs of wear on the exterior of the unit.
Work’s been pretty demanding lately and all this week I barely managed to break away for few hours every evening to go to gym, hence I couldn’t take it outside just yet… so, for now I’ve been snapping pics here and there inside my apartment… VR is performing flawlessly (for the most part), even though I think I can tell the difference between VR II (on my 18-200 VR) and VR version 1 on this lens - I get fewer “missed” shots with VR2. In the next few days I plan to take this lens outside and do some real life testing as well as quite scrupulous comparison to my 18-200 VR. Meanwhile, a couple of shots demonstrating 70-200’s amazing depth of field (or I should say lack thereof :-)
First shot - handheld at 105mm, f/2.8, 1/30, second shot - handheld at 200mm, f/2.8, 1/20… Obviously, no flash used. I did color-corrected and slightly sharpened both of them in photoshop.