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70-200 f2.8 is one of the best lens for fashion & portrait photography. They are also popular for sports & journalism as well. If you have the money of course go get it, but f4 also makes a great buy for cheap and saves a ton of weight as well. Some 70-200 lens suffer from focus breathing, so make sure to check that before pulling the trigger.

For wildlife this zoom range will certainly be limited and you will be better off with the telephoto primes. You can try the lens by attending the manufacturer events which happen from time to time before buying to get an idea of the zoom range and if it fulfils your requirement.

https://youtu.be/GkxYaWaC0So


Me trying out the Nikon D750 + 70-200 F2.8 @event hosted by Nikon & Dabboo Ratnani back in the days.

In addition to what Sam mentioned above - it is a fantastic landscape lens too especially if you stitch multiple vertical images to make a wide panorama. I personally use it for landscapes because I can never make wide and ultra wide angle lenses work and end up with unflattering pictures.

That and just general purpose portraits of people on trips too. Some of the best photos I have ever taken (landscape) have been thru 70-200 or equivalent of it e.g. 35-100 in m43 system which is my go to camera system after I purged all FF and DX gear.

7-200 is an excellent all purpose lense. In my case I prefer faster primes for shooting fast moving objects (kids) especially in low light.

If you are using a 24MP sensor, then there is plenty of real estate for cropping. This is true if you are only posting images or viewing them on computer (4kx6k for 24MP is an overkill).

Consider a prime lense between 80mm and 150mm. The lense will be smaller and you do not have to keep fiddling the zoom to get the action in frame. Zoom with your legs.

The advantage of a zoom is that you do not have to keep fiddling with your legs to get the action/subject into frame! Also that the composition can be just so, in between the usual focal lengths.
Notwithstanding the above, I agree and prefer to use prime lenses for all objects! As my concert photography is usually of dimly (and badly) lit stages, I don't even consider f2.8 as fast! Well, I'm not going to get f1.8 zooms, and if I could I wouldn't be able to afford them.

For general snaps, though, it's hard to beat carrying just the camera and one zoom lens.

Thanks Sam. My 24-105 f4 is my general all purpose lens that stays on the RP. But I have found it’s background blur to be a bit of WIP sometimes. I agree that the 2.8 lenses are expensive. Have to figure out if I can afford them. My biggest personal rule is to use the ever living crap out of anything I buy. So I don’t mind the expense if I see myself putting it to full use.

And thanks for the tip about the range with regards to wildlife. Someone outside the forum also confirmed what you said. I guess if it comes to it I can rent a fast telephoto prime if I am stuck on doing photography when we go on a safari. Mostly though I will choose to skip it and to just enjoy the experience with my kids.


Sir ji… thanks for this amazing tip. I should try it some time. I am just too lazy to work on post. But I will work on correcting this personal drawback.

FYI for big landscapes, I have two wide angles. A recently acquired 16mm f2.8 prime. Very cheap and very light. Then I have the Tamron 15-30 f2.8 for the old Canon EF mount that I adapt onto RF. This Tamron is an elephant of a lens with a huge spherical FE that keeps making me nervous every time I take it out. It is a tack sharp lens and I have never been unhappy with its results. But the recent 16mm acquisition is keeping me happy due to its portability. It has tonnes of in-camera corrections going on. But that’s ok. Having said all this, I do at times think about that Samyang 14mm f2.8. They made that for the RF mount before Canon shut them down. I am indeed a wide angle junkie.

Question for you. Why on earth did you ditch all your FF and APSC gear and move to M43?


I generally used only primes until an year ago when I bought the two zooms I own. I agree with you that the speed of a 1.8 (or lower) lens is unparalleled. But I find that as my kids are growing they aren’t inclined to be in good humour if I zoom with my feet. They just shoo me away. Gone are the days when they happily posed for me. So I need to be a paparazzi in my own house. Just point the lens at them from far and start shooting. This scenario will play out in a larger scale when school events and sports days happen. That’s where zooms will help. But a fast 150mm prime is on my wish list.


So an f2.8 doesn’t work for stage events with weird lighting? Is that what you are saying?


Cheers.

No! Not at all.

I'll give you the context of what I do. I photograph classical, carnatic concerts. They are usually not lit with any kind of professional stage lighting. The hall I most often attend has a hotchpotch of florescent, LED, and other stuff. The stage is not brightly lit, as in a theatre setup: it is more like domestic indoors lighting.

I don't (usually!) have to cope with multicolour spot lights and effects. It is a world away from, say, rock concerts. My subjects are not leaping around either --- but they are far from still and can easily blur the shot with small head movements if the shutter speed is low.

I don't mind much about noise in, say, a backdrop curtain, but I do want faces and shadow on skin to be clean. Mostly I go up to 1600 ISO. I'll may shift to 3200 for a 2.8 lens (I have a couple) but would be very wary of 6400 or above. This is what my camera can handle.

There are many people getting great pics with f2.8 lenses. It helps if they have full-frame cameras (I'm APS-C) so I'm not disrespecting them. Don't misunderstand me! :)

Anyway, there is physics. Even my 17-70/2.8, which I use as an out-and-about lens, is quite heavy for the purpose. There's a 105/1.4 lens I've fancied, but I am a wimp with no muscle, don't like to use a tripod, and it is really more kilos than I could comfortably wave around!

There is physics... and economics!

Multiple reasons really. The M43 is terrifically weatherproof. It rains all the time where I live and nothing beats those cameras and lenses. I have Olympus OMD EM1.2 and various lenses. Way better than Sony and a notch above Nikon even. I have taken that kit in pouring rain and came back home without any fogging.

Secondly, portability. I pack O 12-40, PL 35-100, PL 100-400, O 60mm macro, O 45mm portrait prime + body, all accessories, in medium sized bag. That's 24mm to 800mm. Couldn't do that with FF or APSC.

Then there is general decline of interest :unhappy I had substantial investment in FF (Z6, A7R III, lenses for both) and APSC (D500, lenses). There came a time where I realized the returns from FF/APSC aren't 4x or 2x better than M43 for sporadic user like me and offloaded all that stuff one by one before it became too old.

Going even further, on last 2 trips I used Fuji X100V to see what all the hype was only to realize retro modern, influencer cameras like that are not my cup of tea and went back to M43 + 12-40 as travel setup. The UI, so many dials and buttons drove me crazy. I think I am settled on it for foreseeable future unless Nikon gives me a nice FF fixed lens camera like Sony RX1R. Either that or I find Leica Q2 at a pawn shop on the cheap :cool:

I started out with a point-and-shoot camera back in the days when mobile photography was not so advanced. That changed to a Nikon d5100 and some zoom lenses with f/5.6 and above, so not really that technical stuff.

Things changed when both my phone and camera were upgraded. Given the familiarity and ease of Nikon, I stuck to a d7200 and some prime lenses this time around. The results were very satisfying, but the difficulty of managing gear was ever present. The phone gives instant results and immediate sharing, while not up to the mark of dSLRs.

Today I have found a happy compromise. I take the SLR kit only if I am absolutely certain I will have the time and bandwidth to use it. Otherwise, the phone cam will do fine for most occassions.

Attaching two photos here; it should be pretty easy to guess which is the dSLR shot and which is the mobile one.

My main gripe against most of the mobile phone cameras is how they overprocess photos to compensate for small sensor. They are over sharp, over colorful, over shadow corrected and try to make skin color lighter. The photos look nothing like real life.
Samsung is the worst of all but even iPhone and Pixel do it especially the skin lightening.

Its maddening. Without turning on HDR mode, most of the photos from mobile cameras look like HDR. I don't buy the argument that mobile cameras are as good as standalone cameras. Cramming 50mp into a sensor smaller than baby's nail isn't going to solve any issues.

I do agree compared to 10 years ago, today's phone cameras are way better but seem to have hit a blockade and aren't improving meaningfully quality-wise. When I compare photos from last 4-5 years of various top end Samsung, Pixel cameras I can hardly tell a difference. Instead most companies are focusing on machine learning/AI tactics to improve photos (Google notably). To me that reads like even more processed and fake looking photos.
One thing that today's phone cameras are 100% better (v/s phones from 2017-18) at is night photography. The way S23 Ultra, Pixel 7/8 can capture night sky with stars and moon is nothing short of astonishing.