My New Lens Strategy

Blake's birthday party is on Saturday, so as is my tradition I've been producing a short movie of the past year of his life using my collection of video and stills.

As I've been watching the video over and over again as I edit it together, and my favorite clip is one where my sister's dog was licking Blake's face. Aside from being funny, the video quality is noticeably better than any other indoor video I've got. Aside from being taken at midday with good light coming through the windows, it was the only clip I took with my 50mm f/1.4, most of the rest was with the 17-55mm f/2.8 IS.

Because of the favorable lighting this is hardly a fair comparison, but I'm pretty sure that the 50mm's wider aperture is a major advantage with indoor video because I'm unable to compensate with flash as I am with a photo. The 17-55mm has the advantage of stabilization so there is a tradeoff.

I shot one of Kyla's T-Ball games with my 24-105mm f/4 IS and while the pictures looked pretty good, I had to do a lot of cropping whenever I got a shot of a kid fielding the ball because of how far away from me they were. I've been wanting a 70-200mm for a long time now, but I've kept putting it off in favor of more general purpose lenses.

My dream lens became the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS. Canon just released a new version of this lens but it's MSRP is $2500, which seems to steep for a sole breadwinner hobbyist, so I went to Craigslist in search of a deal on a used one. The discounts on Canon's L lenses aren't great, so I decided to sell the 17-55mm to help smooth the purchase over with my wife. I bought the 17-55mm used in the first place and recouped my investment plus $25.

Now I'm left with the following arsenal:

Canon 50mm f/1.4

This lens will be used for shooting indoors when lighting is low or I want to take video.

Canon 24-105mm f/4 IS L

This is my goto lens for general purpose shooting outdoors, but I'll also use it indoors with flash.

Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L

My long lens for shooting sports both indoor and out (I'll need to use flash indoors). I'm hoping it's adequate for shooting Kyla's dance recital (where flash isn't allowed); there will still be some blur but the 7D can fire at 8 frames per second so even with a low keeper-rate I should be left with a few good ones.