Canon EF 500mm f/4 L IS USM

In a word, excellent!

CANON 500mm F4 IS

Despite writing lots of appraisals about gear, I'm not really much of a techy. From my point of view, a piece of kit should do the job it's designed for, efficiently, and for a long time. That's about it. As a result, I rarely experience "gear lust"...the hankering for a piece of kit akin to looking forward to a Michelin star meal. My feelings about this lens are the exception.

Before owning a Canon 500mm, I had, for years, played with those owned by friends and colleagues and effectively fallen in love with it as one of the finest telephoto lenses in the world. It is of course a very pricey bit of kit, but boy, you get what you pay for.

I agonised for some time over the wide range of super-telephoto lenses offered by Canon before I spent that kind of money. The problem is that they are all exceptionally good. In the end though, I settled on the 500mm for a number of reasons.

SIZE: It's a good compromise this. Yup, it's a bulky lens, but not as heavy or physically long as the 600. That makes it fairly easy to carry around in a good back-pack or even on the tripod if you're actively following and photographing your subject. The 400mm is smaller still but of course you sacrifice a bit of reach with the loss of mm's. 500mm is a good compromise. Slap on the 1.4x converter and you have a very decent 700mm lens with all the same electronic functions (auto focus etc) as the lens alone.

SPEED: This lens is super fast to follow focus when set on automatic (though this feature does vary depending on the camera body you choose). It's even quicker if you use the function that restricts the range the lens has to hunt through to find its target. Great if you know where your subject is going to turn up, but in practice it's usually a more useful function for sports photographers who can predict where the goal or the finishing line will be than it is for wildlife photographers, whose subjects are usually very unpredictable. It's also extremely quiet as it hunts for focus. Wee buttons up the front of the lens switch the AF off momentarily if you wish - handy if the lens keeps hunting on a tricky subject (in long grass etc).

IS: Image Stabiliser. In a word, excellent! I've often used the lens resting on a car door (sometimes just using a jacket for support when I can't get my hand to a bean-bag in time) and had cracking, sharp results. The single biggest reason for soft shots with a telephoto lens is camera shake, and this is ironed out beautifully by the 500mm. Of course, it can,t freeze the movement of your subject, so you still have to pick your moment, but in effect, the IS gives you the facility to work a couple of F stops lower than if you had a standard lens.

My only real criticism of the lens is its colour. In common with all the Canon telephoto range, it comes in the signature "white with a red stripe" of the brand. This makes no difference if you are shooting from a vehicle or working with subjects that are indifferent to man. But if you want to work from a hide or in camouflage then the white does stand out. Of course, it's nothing a bit of camo tape can't sort.

If you have the resources, this is THE lens to get for wildlife photography.