New Lenses!

Photography in our house got escalated a notch this week.

As I stated briefly last week, I ordered a new lens for Suzie.  She will say that it's not hers, it's ours, and I understand that.  Still, I bought it for her as an anniversary gift.  She's a good photographer with a love of flower shots, and she deserves a good lens.  The lenses that come with these cameras we own are very functional lenses in a very usable range, but they just lack clarity and crispness.  The week began on Monday with the arrival of the first brand new lens we've ever bought.

This lens is a Canon lens, and is therefore not very cheap ($500+).  It doesn't have zoom, nor does it have the IS (image stabilization) feature.  It's a dedicated 100mm lens.  So what does it have?  Well, it has a relatively low F-number, which means it's good in low light.  It's also very sharp.  It's also very good as a dedicated macro (closeup) lens--One of the best in fact.  The quality of Suzie's pictures has already gone up since the arrival of that lens.  It's pretty nice!

That wasn't the only one.  Yesterday another lens arrived--One that we already owned.  Huh?

A couple months ago (not sure when exactly) Suz bought a lens from a local seller on Craigslist.  It's a pretty nice lens for a "kit" (a lens that comes bundled with a new camera when you buy it) lens.  Our cameras both came with a cheaply-made (but very usable) 18-55mm zoom.  This particular lens is a 28-135mm zoom, and it came bundled with better Canon cameras.  Anyway, shortly after she spent $250 bucks on it, it died.  It still took pictures, but the auto focus became sporadic (if it worked at all) and we weren't at all sure the IS feature was doing any better because it was hard to tell if the autofocus wasn't working.  I doubt the seller knowingly sold us a bad lens--We were just victims of bad timing.  Now we were faced with using it as a manual focus lens or repairing it.  Was it worth repairing?  How much would the lens end up costing when all was said and done?  Visions of dollar signs floated back and forth as I did my best to get an estimate for repair.  I used it for a few days and was convinced that it was a nice lens and worthy of keeping, so I sent it in to Canon in California for a repair estimate.  They came back with an email saying it was going to cost $102 to fix.  Cool!  I gave them the go-ahead and it just showed up yesterday.  Pretty fast turn-around if you ask me.  They did a complete repair, calibration, and cleaning.  It works nice!

Now we have two new lenses in the family!