24, 105, Hut, Hut, Hike. The Canon 24-105 L is a winner.

Football season is coming to an end and I am finally getting around to writing about my new Canon EF 24-105mm L IS lens. I read tons of reviews on this lens and weighed the pros and cons just like any other photographer would when faced with buying their first serious piece of glass - (I won't rehash all the pluses and minus of this lens and the other lens that are comparable, as it has already been done many times over). Since this lens was easily twice as expensive as any other lens I have purchased in the past, the decision weighed heavily on me. Ultimately though, I think I made a great decision. This lens is very sharp, has fast auto focus, and is simply a joy to use since I can spend more time taking pictures rather than post processing them (more on this below).

As I am sure that any photographer who shoots digital already knows, just because you CAN edit and tweak your pictures doesn't mean that you necessarily should...BUT, because you can, you always end up doing so...And also, just because you can pixel-peep doesn't mean you should, but again, you inevitably do. The Canon 24-105 L makes all these inevitabilities all in all, less painful.

My previous main lens was the Canon EF-S 17-85mm IS. While I thoroughly enjoyed this lens (great range on my Canon Rebel XTI) for about two years, I ultimately wasn't super satisfied by it. As I used it more and more, the more I realized that I hated certain aspects about this lens - namely, the barrel distortion at the wide end and the awful chromatic abberations. While the barrel distortion is actually quite easy to fix using Adobe Photoshop's Lens Correct tool or PTLens, it proved to be time consuming and rather annoying in terms of my overall workflow. Additionally, and unfortunately, the chromatic abberations were not nearly so easy to fix and required a lot of tweaking to "get it right".

I don't really like spending tons of time editing my photos, and I like being able to do a quick flip through and choose my "picks" and "rejects" using Lightroom. With the 17-85, I often found that after culling my "picks" I had to pop over into Photoshop to correct the barrel distortion on all my wide angle keepers and painstakingly correct the chromatic abberations, which were killing the sharpness of my pictures.

Now, after having shot for a while with my new 24-105, I can easily say that my post processing time has been reduced by an order of magnitude and I find that the majority of tweaks that I am doing are simple white balance, color saturation, and sharpening fixes all in Lightroom.

With this lens, the contrast simply pops - this is a really difficult thing to explain, but once you see L glass and the contrast and sharpness that it provides, you'll know it. I used to emulate this kind of pop by cranking the clarity slider in Lightroom and then increasing sharpness, but again, this took time and really only had maximum effect in the sharpest part of the image (namely the center of the frame where the 17-85 was sharpest). The corner to corner sharpness of the 24-105 is VERY GOOD.

In terms of ergonomics, the 24-105 took a bit to get used to - the zoom and focus ring positions are reversed and the lens is MUCH heavier than the 17-85 (if you are coming from the 18-55 kit lens, you'll think someone attached a boulder to your camera body). After about 30 minutes of shooting though, both these became non issues. What you'll also notice is that the zoom ring is quite a bit stiffer than the 17-85 and the 18-55 kit lens - this is a good thing as it prevents lens creep and inspires a sense of solidness with this lens. Given the added weight, in low light shooting you'll notice that you'll have to modify your hand holding technique - or at least get used to the increase in weight.

As you can probably tell, I really like this lens. I won't say that it is right for everyone though - although, I will say that it was very right for me. Whether this lens proves to be equally right for you, really depends on your shooting style. On a crop body like the Rebel XTI I shoot with, many people say that the lens isn't wide enough and is really equivalent to a 38mm lens and that with the 17-85mm and the 17-55mm, you get true wide angle. While I don't dispute that you lose out on a creative range by giving up the 17-24mm range, the question that you need to ask is how important that range is to YOUR style of shooting. After analyzing my EXIF data for over a year's worth of pictures I found that I really didn't shoot much in that range and when I did, it was typically landscape type shots that I would have easily switched over to my 10-22mm to shoot.

Is this lens a compromise - yes, of course it it, but so is every other lens. With this lens, you get great sharpness, a very useful shooting range (if you like street photography and candids like me, then the longer reach of this lens is perfect), image stabilization, and a constant f4 aperture. What you lose is a true wide angle range and about a thousand bucks.

Ultimately if you are considering this lens, you already know about its positives. In the end, it is really up to you whether this lens suits your shooting style. If I were a big time landscape and nature photographer, I'd probably have the same complaints as some of the other people out there. What I would encourage you to do is to browse around at people's galleries that were shot with this lens and see if your shooting style matches their photographs that they took with this lens.

To take a look at some photos taken with the 24-105mm and the 17-85mm, check out my Flickr photostream - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancmak/.