Canon announced a whole slew of new products earlier this week, among them a really, really sweet L-series fisheye and an update to the near-perfect 300mm f/2.8L telephoto.
The new EF 8–15mm f/4L USM fisheye lens is pretty revolutionary in that it’s a zoom fisheye. Canon has never offered a 
lens like Nikon’s 10.5mm fisheye that gives 180 degree corner to corner coverage on a crop sensor. I shoot two bodies these days, a Canon 7D for action, and a Canon 5D mkII for almost everything else. The 7D uses an APS-C size sensor, which is smaller than the 5DmkII’s full-frame sensor. With lenses designed originally for 35mm film (the size of a full-frame sensor), these APS-C cameras crop and effectively magnify the image by a factor of 1.6. So unless the lens is specifically designed for the smaller sensor, this makes your wide angle lenses less wide, and telephotos, well, more telephoto. In the case of the ultra-wide, distorted fisheye, you end up with a minimal fisheye effect. It’s just sort of a semi-distorted, kinda wide angle, uhhh, weird mess. Not so any more.
Now, with the new zoom feature, everyone can use just one lens for fisheyed goodness regardless of what camera body they shoot. I bought the 7D and 5DmkII combo specifically to avoid having to commit to the bulk of the 1D series bodies. The 7D, for outdoor action photography, is arguably as good as the mkIV, and combined with the f/4L lenses, much, much lighter in a pack full of backcountry ski gear. For everything else, including action shoots with off-camera lighting, the 5D mkII is just stunning and I don’t think there’s any competition until you start talking Leica or digital medium format. I’ve resisted buying the Canon fisheye, but now I’ll have to reconsider. It’s a specific look that should NOT be overused, but it has its usefulness and can create some really fun results.
I also mentioned the EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM earlier – it’s a mid-range tele prime that’s insanely sharp, and it manages to stay sharp wide open at f/2.8 AND at the corners, with really no vignetting. It’s a thing of beauty, and the new one is lighter, has new coatings, new image stabilization and focusing functions, and should be even better than the previous version, if that’s really even possible. It also plays very nicely with the 1.4x and 2x tele extenders for brightly-lit ski and wildlife photography, giving you a ridiculous range of options:
-300mm with 5D mkII
-420mm with 5D mkII + 1.4x
-480mm with 7D + 300mm
-600mm with 5D mkII + 2x
-672mm with 7D + 300mm + 1.4x
-960mm with 7D + 300mm + 2x
The extenders scrub some speed and sharpness, but lo and behold, Canon has also announced updated EF 1.4x III and EF 2x III Extenders too. So now for a cool $7000+, a paltry sum compared with the really big Canon tele lenses, you too can get razor-sharp shots of the nose hairs of that mountain lion as it’s bounding in your general direction. AND you can shoot it hand-held without a massive tripod and dedicated tripod head so you can run like hell afterward. Thank you Canon, it’s all about survival out there…!
