Hunting Focus

So one of my more recent lens purchases is the nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR. I have the older model (The VR II came out like last month or something). I knew the VR II was out when I bought this, but I found one in great shape on craigslist for a reasonable price.

Even the person I bought it from said “oh, its not the sharpest thing” and “it vignettes”. For my non-photo friends (if any read this blog) vignettes means it gets darker, like a shadow in the corners. Not sharp just means it looks like its never quite in focus.

I just got done shooting 3 days of portraits for the Beast Women Productions winter series and the opening night. And the cracks against this lens are a load of hooey. It works fine, if you do your job – the pictures are no better and no worse than other lenses. I do find it a little more difficult to get it to focus in low light – and the theater with all its lights on is still technically low light. The 80-400 VR (also a maligned lens on the  internets) does a bit better at Auto Focus in this light. As to the vignetting? I have no idea what people are talking about.

Also keep in mind that due to the light, I shot this in Aperture mode with the aperture nailed at f/2.8 (wide open). For any lens, shooting wide open like this should show off all its bad habits immediately. Guess what? If the performer is holding sort of still and my shutter is 1/30 or higher, i get decent pics most of the time.

This has to be the internet phenomenon of pixel peeping where all these critics do is shoot gray test shots and then blow them up to 200% and complain about its not as sharp as BLah blah blah.

My complaints with this lens? Its long and heavy. Its nearly too long to fit in my domke bag (and I have the largest bag domke makes) and it weighs more than I wish it did. Its built like a tank, takes fine pictures when I’m not screwing up, and I’m quite pleased with it.

This annoys me to no end – as a still relatively new photographer it would be nice to get ideas/counsel/advice from the internets. But this trend of finding that lenses that do poorly on the internet work just fine in reality is a bummer. I guess at some level you just have to test stuff yourself and guess at whats likely to be good or bad.