Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III

Canon's EF 75-300 F/4-5.6 III is an extremely cheap option for telephoto zoom lenses, the cheapest version available at around $150 AUD. This is an extremely capable lens for it's price tag, As you would expect for $150 this lens does not come equipped with Image Stabilisation nor does it carry a fixed aperture through it's zoom range. But for a 300mm reach on Full frame, and 450mm on APSC this isn't a bad option. I recently spent the day with this lens testing a few options.

The lack of image stabilisation can be detrimental at 300mm hand held, especially 450mm If you run an APSC sensor or step your full frame camera down to APSC capture. For high shutter speeds upwards of 1/1000th it's not too bad, but if you're trying to capture a birds wings moving while retaining sharpness of the body at speeds like 1/160 or 1/200 hopefully you have a steady hand. The Image stabilised version is about $250 AUD more expensive, depending on usage it might be better to go for that one. All shots were taken on the Sony A7r, lacking In built image stabilisation and switching between 36mp Full frame and 15mp APSC size capture trying to eliminate post processing cropping.

Image quality is what you would expect from such a cheap lens, on the dull side of what we would call sharp with noticeable chromatic aberrations in high contrast areas.

Telephoto primes seem to be the end game for many photographers, with Canon and Nikon lenses overwhelmingly expensive for the average photographer, unless wildlife and bird watching are something you value highly most of us could get away with using something like this.

The focusing system seems to be ok mounted to native canon dlsr's, although still rather slow. Mounted to the A7r it is extremely slow, especially when birds are moving around and you're constantly changing focal point to accommodate, I chose to use manual focus for many of my shots as this was quicker for me. I did have many shots that I missed with faster moving birds, but the majority were ok.

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