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Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L – So Good Your Other Lenses are Already Jealous

After a long hiatus, here I am back with some hot review action for your pleasure. My first (but I assure you not my last) Canon “L” lens review is about the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L. Ryan wrote earlier about his first “L” lens, and I must say that my experience emotionally mirrored his a great deal when this arrived from B&H. It was the first “L” I owned, and it is to date my favorite lens that I have used.

It’s really somewhat difficult to know where to start talking about this lens. It’s just that good. I guess a solid thing to lead with is that I went though a lot of inner turmoil deciding between this lens and the similarly priced 24-105mm f/4L IS. It seemed at the time like a hard decision. The 24-105 had the obvious advantages of being a little longer, and having the image stabilization built in. Would this make up for the difference in aperture? I really didn’t know. After objectively browsing through my Flickr account, I realized three things.

• I like shooting portraits and people more than anything else.
• I often like a narrow depth of field when shooting people.
• I often shoot in very low light.

With this in mind, I decided that the extra width on the 24-70 was worth it, and I made the purchase.

In hindsight, this was a no-brainer decision. I’ve now shot with both of these lenses, and while the 24-105 is a truly awesome piece of gear, I would take my 24-70 over it seven days a week and twice on Sundays. If any of you out there are also making this choice, that is my two cents on the matter.

So let’s talk about some of the things that make shooting with this lens so truly wonderful. To start with, as noted, I love shooting portraits. On my Canon 30D with the 1.6x focal length multiplier, this lens is effectively a 38-112mm lens, which really covers a perfect range for social portrait shooting. You can be three feet away or fifteen feet away, and you’ll be able to nail your shot. The f/2.8 gives a great background blur of course, so your subjects will pop into sharp relief in your images. It’s built solidly, as all the Canon L lenses are, and is fairly weather resistant if you’re shooting in harsher environments.

But, those are really just the things you’d obviously expect from looking at the basic specs. Impressive, sure, but not really magical. I can assure you though, dear reader, this is a genuinely magical lens.

When I got my first round of images shot with this lens into Aperture, I was nothing short of astonished. The richness of the colors, the depth of the contrast, and the incredible sharpness were far beyond anything I had ever produced before myself. It was literally a whole new level for me. I remembered that soon after I’d gotten my first DSLR, I asked my friend and photography mentor Peter Reid the question, “How much of it is the photographer, and how much of it is the gear?” His response essentially was, “Nothing is more important than the person taking the shots, but I won’t lie… the gear definitely helps.”

This lens, it helps. It does more than help, really. I think it would be more accurate to say that it inspires. When looking through my images with this lens, I felt for the first time like I might have a real shot at one day being able to take “truly great” photographs, as opposed to the “very good” level I had been previously aspiring to. I know it’s a bit cheezy to say that, but it’s true.

Is it perfect? Well, no. Not quite anyway. There are a very few cons that I’ve found, and here they are as I see them. First off, there’s the obvious cost. It’s not cheap, but if you can afford it I will say without reservation that it is worth the money. Second, it’s heavy. It weighs more than the Canon 30D body does. On my kit, with the battery grip attached, you are very aware of the weight when you put your eye up to the viewfinder. Personally, the weight is something I kind of like, but it is definitely a factor. There is technically a smidgen of barrel distortion when you’re zoomed all the way out at 24mm, but you have to really be looking hard to see it. The zoom control ring is a teensy bit sticky feeling at the ends of the range, though it’s like butter through the middle. And finally, the oddest con (for me) is that the zoom telescopes in reverse from how you expect it to. Meaning that when you are as wide as you can go at 24mm, the lens fully extended. When you are at 70mm, the lens is not telescoped out at all. No doubt there’s a good technical reason why it’s built that way, but it’s just a bit eerie to me.

All in all though, that list of cons is so incredibly trivial when you think about them relative to the quality of the shots you’ll get, I almost didn’t mention them here. It just seemed like the right thing to do for posterity. The best way to close, I think, is by saying this: if I were told that I could only ever have two lenses for the rest of my life, based on everything I’ve used so far, it would be this lens, and Ryan’s 70-200 that was reviewed previously. It’s my goto glass for the majority of my shooting, and my favorite piece of gear in my kit. If you can get one, I urge you to do so without delay.

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Autofocus Lens Tech Specs (from bhphoto.com)
Filter Size	77mm
f/Stop Range	2.8-22
Minimum Focus Distance	1.25′ (0.38)
Magnification	1:3.5
Zoom/Focus Control	Two touch
Angle of View	74 to 29 degrees
Groups/Elements	13/16
Length	4.9″ (123.5mm)
Maximum Diameter	3.3″ (83.2mm)
Weight	2.1 lb (950 g)