I've been in Scotland for the last 10 days or so and doing a lot of shooting with Canon's brand new EF 11-24mm f/4L. The main purpose of the trip was for landscape photography, which I figured was a good place to start for our review.
There are a lot of things that make the EF 11-24mm f/4L a challenging lens to use for landscape. First and foremost is not being able to use filters. A lot of the time, especially scenes with wet rocks and water, a polarizer is sorely missed. In Scotland, with the ever changing skies and varied foregrounds, the inability to use graduated neutral density filters is also difficult. A lot of people are fine to do exposure blending, which is not something I'm all that keen on. I prefer one frame for exposure. Currently there is no filter holder available for this lens, but hopefully the folks at Lee Filters are working on a solution for grads and stoppers.
11mm is wide, and in a lot of cases too wide for landscape photography if you don't have a bold object in the foreground. You really do get the whole world in the frame, and the difference between 11mm and 15mm is quite substantial, as that is what I'm used to shooting at with the Zeiss 15mm f/2.8.
The build quality and optics are top notch, everyone that has used this lens says the same thing. I have found the distortion to be very well controlled and I haven't done any correction in post. There's currently no profile for the lens in Lightroom, but I haven't felt I needed one either.
I return home this week, so I'll be going through all the images captured with the lens and we'll get a review up soon after.
Canon EF 11-24mm f/4L USM $2999: Adorama | B&H Photo | Amazon