Rain stopped a serious evening photoshoot so instead I shot the rain.
“Eeeeek!” screamed the little voice coming from my 18-55mm EF-S kit lens when I took this monster out of it’s box. Alas it knew it’s days were numbered. It travelled half way round the world to get into my grubby little hands but after only a 2 day trip it’s here and atttached to my 20D. Boxed in Hong Kong and stopping for brief periods in The Philippines, Indonesia, Paris and most exotic of all Shannon, it was delivered this morning.
Saved a packet over the €500+ retail price tag in Ireland; but then… nobody with any sense buys electronics or camera equipment in Ireland anymore, do they?
After all the formalities of “oooh”ing and “ahhh”ing were out of the way I proceeded to perform the dreaded front/back focus test. From my regular trawlings around the forums of Digital Photography Review and other various websites I found that an alarmingly high number of owners of this very lens have reported bad focusing problems; especially front focus. Carefully (yeah right) I lined up a few items on my mantlepiece and using centre point focusing I shot the middle item, a white corkscrew in this case. From my as yet untrained and amateur eye, the focus looks pretty much dead on.
Thank God for Canadians! If it wasn’t for my newest pal Albert at Kea Photo this lens would have undoubtably cost me a hell of a lot more. Great guy to deal with, he even tested the lens for focusing problems on a 20D before he shipped it. I will buy from him again and I’d recommend you all do the same.
Right then, now if it would only stop bloody raining so I could venture out and get a few shots of something other than the dog…