Using the 24-70 II for documentary wedding photography - my review

[Mark Carey]

Hello everyone. Im off to shoot a wedding today but got an email to tell me my server has gone down as they see such a spike in traffic. I'm hopping it will be up and running later today!

best wishes

Mark

[wockawocka]

I have been using this lens for a few weeks now and I have published some of my thoughts here - not very technical but will show my hands-on experiences shooting an entire documentary wedding with it are:
http://www.markcareyphotography.com/2012/jo-and-karim-canon-ef-24-70mm-f2-8-ii-usm-l-review/

Thank you for reading.

Nice black and whites. Whatever you use it looks fab.

[Mark Carey]

The site is back up and running again now!

[Zlatko]

Great!  Thank you for the review!  Very interesting to read your review of this lens as I have much the same needs from it.  Very good point about "appropriate" depth of field too.

[Mark Carey]

Thanks Zlatko, glad you got though in the end. I hope you get to use this on a wedding. When things are  happening fast and furious, this is the lend you need.  It was a long time coming this lens. Nikon have had such a brilliant 24-70 out there for so long, Canon really needed to catch up and now I think it has.


cheers

Mark

[drjlo]

"What Id really like though is a 24-85mm F1.4 that weighs less and has image stabilisation — I wont hold my breath though."

Couldn't agree more   

[brianleighty]

"What Id really like though is a 24-85mm F1.4 that weighs less and has image stabilisation — I wont hold my breath though."

Couldn't agree more   

Well theoretically, I think that might be possible, but you forgot one thing in there that makes it impossible. Image quality. The greater the aperture the more you need extra elements to deal with all the issues caused by it. Plus bigger aperture requires bigger glass. Thus bigger elements * More elements = Greater weight. In this case (24-85 1.4) I don't even know if it's possible but if it was it would so heavy you couldn't carry it. Now if you said, forget image quality we'll just have say 4-6 big glass elements to meet the aperture objective and not worry about correcting for anything. But hey it's a 24-85 1.4. Who else has one of those? Yet nobody would buy it. Oh and even though it might be advertised as 1.4 aperture it's T-stop would probably be more like t3.8 or something since in order to save on cost they wouldn't coat the elements to prevent light loss in each element. Wanna buy one? I always see signs at a auto repair shops that say you can only have two cheap, fast, high quality. In photography I think you could say light, cheap, and big aperture. I'm not sure if cheap and big aperture so well but you get the point. Bigger aperture means more money. There's no getting around that.