Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Lens

I never thought I would be posting a review for a macro lens, but we recently started using the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Lens and I have to say, it’s pretty great. I usually have a deeply rooted stigma with macro photography. As a photography lecturer, editing photographer’s portfolios can be a little tricky, because the first images that usually go are most of the time the photographer’s pets.

I call it getting rid of the “Dirty Five.” Flowers, Kids, Silhouettes, Sunsets (usually silhouetted) and Macros. Why are these the “Dirty Five,” well most of the time they are story-less and a lot more of them are simply a dime a dozen. I know I’m alienating a large part of photographers out there, but the story for me is the most important aspect of a photo. Yes, they are pretty, artistic, and some are down right beautiful, but the problem is that these types of pictures are so easy to make it’s hard to be unique at it.

Macro shots are no exception. People buy the lens, slap it on and for the next few weeks, months or years, everyone they know is now obliged to entertain one super close up photo after another. From grapes to their stapler, everything is abstracted.

WHY I WOULD BUY Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM Lens –

In my opinion, a macro lens is just like anything in photography, a tool to help tell the story better. So with that being said, we got the EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro Lens for the simple reason that it is extremely sharp, slightly sharper even than the EF 24-70mm we own, and we benefit from the lens’s added compression from the focal length which helps blur the background out even more. It would be a great lens even if it had no macro focus at all. I had to use the Auto Focus once and it seemed faster than my eye. Also the image stabilization helps those hand held shots out a bunch.