Canon RF 100mm f2.8 L macro lens initial user report 19 October 2021

 

Blandfordia nobilis  Christmas bells.  Climate change in action. Christmas bells are now  flowering in October

One of my interests is photographing  flowers, mostly native wildflowers on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

In the good ol’ film days I used a Canon SLR with a 1990 EF 100mm macro lens. This had no stabiliser and neither did any Canon SLR so I always had to use a tripod and often had to stabilise the flowers with some kind of restraint system. This made the work slow but I still got many good photos.

Nineteen years later Canon introduced an upgrade in the form of the 2009 EF 100mm f2.8 L macro IS USM. I never got to use this lens as I had switched to Panasonic micro 4/3 which had much more reliable autofocus than Canon DSLRs at the time.  By the way that situation has now reversed with the advent of Canon’s dual pixel AF which is excellent and much better than Panasonic’s which still uses a variant of contrast detect technology.

Since moving into the Canon full frame mirrorless RF system I have been using the RF 35mm f1.8 and RF 85mm f2 lenses for flowers. These lenses are optically excellent and allow a maximum magnification of  0.5x which is sufficient for most flowers.

However the 85mm in particular is a bit slow to focus in the close-up range.

Canon introduced the mirrorless R series cameras and RF lenses in 2018. Some of the new RF lenses are traditional offerings like the 15-35mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm f2.8 L series for professional use.

But many of the new RF series lenses offer some special characteristic or capability not previously seen in the EF series or anywhere else in the camera world.

One of these is the subject of this report, the F 100mm f2.8 L IS USM macro.

As a macro lens it can focus down to 1.4x lifesize, This means that at minimum focus distance the horizontal field of view on the focal plane is 26mm.

However the lens also works extremely well as a general purpose 100mm optic, with super fast AF and a stabiliser.

A very high level of sharpness is retained right across the range from infinity to extreme close-up.  Most lenses are unable to achieve this.

But wait, there’s more. The lens is super sharp across the frame and into the far corners right from f2.8.

And more still. We like a lens to be super sharp in the in-focus parts of the image and super soft in the out of focus parts. This lens delivers just that.  Many lenses especially zooms are less sharp in the in focus parts of the image and less smooth in the out of focus parts.

One benefits of the enhanced capability of this lens is that I now need to use the tripod much less often than previously.

In fact I often treat my little flower subjects as I would  running animals. I set the lens aperture to f16, auto ISO and shoot at High+ continuous frame rate with Servo AF.  As the flower waves about in the breeze, the AF is fast enough to follow focus on it and give me a useful percentage of sharp frames. I doubt many macro lenses can do that.

I am finding that the RF 100mm F2.8 macro delivers excellent results with macro as expected but also general photography, portraiture, sport/action and some  kinds of landscape.