I’ve had a lot of people ask me in the past about lenses, which ones they should buy etc….  my first two responses (if they’re looking for a Canon lens) are to check out the Photography On The Net message board thread HERE which lists every single Canon or Canon compatible lens with photos taken by people with that specific lens (you must be a member and logged in to view the photos in the threads, but it’s free and it’s a great message board as well), and when they figure out which lens they want and what’s in their price range…I tell them to go ahead and RENT that lens first.

I’ve been using the 100-400mm f4/5.6 USM IS L lens for all of my wildlife photography for several years now.  What I’ve discovered is that I rarely use it at anything other than 400mm.  I love all of the prime lenses I own (the 50mm 1.4 and the 100mm 2.8) so I started to look into the Canon 400mm 5.6 L prime lens.  I liked what I saw, I liked what people were saying about it so I decided to rent it.

The first thing I loved was it’s size and weight.  It was smaller and lighter than my 100-400 and it also had a built in lens hood you could just pull out and twist to tighten it.  I ALWAYS wrestle with the lens hood on my 100-400, so this was a nice change!

In the photo above the 400mm prime is on my 50D and the 100-400mm is beside it without the barrel extended to 400mm which makes it even larger.  The 400mm prime has the lens hood extended.

So….I had to play with the lens right?  I headed out to one of my favorite wildlife spots and had fun with it.  First thing I noticed, besides the nice size and weight was how fast the focus would lock onto a bird.  The next thing I noticed was what all prime lenses have…beautiful sharpness.  I’ve posted some photos below for you to view taken with the 400mm prime.  These photos only have minor edits like crop/color/etc.  I didn’t sharpen these, I didn’t even ‘web sharpen’ them.  Pretty much everyone does at least a web sharpen, but I figured if I was going to review this lens on my blog I wanted you to see what came out of the camera…

(no crop on the Great Blue Heron image above)

I’m still deciding what I want to do….if I want to sell the 100-400 and go for the 400mm or not…..I’ll announce it here what I decide to do

I was the lucky recipient of a 16×20 gallery wrapped canvas to blog about from Zaza Gallery!  It arrived the other day and I brought it outside to take some photos of it and share the details with you.  It’s gorgeous, I love it, and since it’s of one of my beautiful nieces, it will be delivered to my sister in law and brother this weekend.

First off, when you order a gallery wrapped canvas….16×20 is the size to go with.  It’s not too big, and not too small.  It’s a fantastic size to show off your image.

A little about the photo…. my niece received the cutest little Tinkerbell costume for Christmas and put it on right away.  She was running around the house, mostly acting like a frog and ribbiting, but I loved this shot I caught of her trying to see her wings behind her.   When I have the camera on my nieces, I have to be QUICK.  The settings weren’t quite right, I didn’t have a flash, and the image turned out a little on the blurry and noisy side.  I adjusted in photoshop, giving it a black and white tone (although the photo below does not do it justice) and a little fairy ‘glow’ to it.  I figured, why not use this image for the canvas…to see how well a ‘not so good’ and ‘photoshop adjusted’ image would do on the canvas.  It came out great!  I’m super pleased!

They did a beautiful job of ‘wrapping’ the canvas as you can see below:

Zaza Gallery has some great prices on these, the 8×10 canvas start at $25!  So head on over to their website HERE and check it out!

As a Christmas/Birthday gift to myself I bought (and just received) the small Jill-e Bag and I LOVE it. I bought it so that I can take my camera more places in a purse. Regular purses just don’t have enough padding to make it ’safe’ to carry my camera around in (I’ve been known to cover the bottom of a purse with a small folded towel for padding, lol). Also, this will be perfect to carry everything I need to do an on location portrait shoot or to carry my gear to my studio.

As a special offer, I have coupon codes for you from Jill-e bags if you’d like to get one for yourself! Codes will be at the bottom of this post.

Here is the bag I bought, the Small Bone Leather Bag.  I took these photos myself in the studio and at home.

It has a pocket in the front, a pocket on each side and a pocket in the back.  It has the regular straps but also comes with a longer strap to make this more of a shoulder bag.  Inside is a small zipped pocket/wallet that attaches to the bag.

I did this photo to give you the size of the bag in relation to a person (well, a person (me) who is on the short side at 5′4″).  I love the size.  It’s perfect and just what I was looking for.  Please excuse the beat up Nike sneakers, which are due to be replaced shortly!

Here’s the inside of the bag.  I put everything in it I’d normally take along with me.  You can see the 50D with the 50mm 1.4 lens attached, the Blackrapid strap (which is attached to the camera), the 18-55mm lens, the battery charger, the battery charger that fits into the cig lighter in the car (which the canon battery charger plugs right into so you can charge batteries while you drive), my Aleve (I don’t leave home without it!), and my wallet is in there underneath everything (see those two eyeballs, it’s an owl wallet, lol).  You can also see the small wallet/zip compartment attached to the bag.  If I wanted more space I could easily leave the battery chargers in the car, take out the zip compartment, and switch to a smaller wallet and could probably add a second DSLR in there on the right hand side.  Oh, and of course the iphone fits in there, which I forgot to add when I took the pictures.

Here is the top of the bag, it also holds all kinds of small stuff, I’ve got a lens cap and all of my CF cards in it.

To give you another idea of the size of this bag…I took the photo above with the 50D and 100-400mm f4/5.6 USM IS L lens attached to it (with the Blackrapid strap) inside the bag.  You can see there’s still room over on the left hand side to squeeze in a wallet or even a smaller lens.  Also, there’s all kinds of velcro separators that come in the bag, so you can move them around to fit all of your stuff and keep it snug. Normally, I only bring out this big lens when I go do wildlife photography, and I have a large Lowepro backpack for that (see it and photos HERE).  But, putting the monster lens in there was another way to show you the size of this bag.

All in all, I’m in love.  This is bag is what I’ve really been wanting and needing.  It fits everything I need and it’s cute too!

If you’d like a Jill-e bag, you can find their website HERE

and…

Here’s coupon codes for you!