The last time we ventured to the Billy Frank Refuge was June of last year. During that time, we got stuck in a deluge and were completely unprepared for the rain. Today, we were lucky – no rain (even though I was wearing my raincoat).
There were a handful of photographers there today. Some of them were carrying much longer focal lengths than my paltry 70-200mm, and they had monopods to boot. At one point, as we were walking by one such photographer, I commented very loudly to my wife – “I don’t know why anyone would need a lens that big, I just use my phone – it’s just as good!” I’m not sure the other photog heard me, but at least I made myself laugh.
Up until yesterday, I was selling the Panasonic 70-200mm f/4 lens on eBay, but wasn’t getting any takers. I had the lowest price on there for weeks now, and I really didn’t want to lower the price any more. For the time being, I’ll probably just keep the lens. It’s built well and has very good optical stabilization – which isn’t really needed. I say not needed, because pretty much everything I was shooting today required fast shutter speeds – thereby negating the necessity of using optical image stabilization. Although, it does help with steadying the composition of your image.
I like the Panasonic 70-200mm f/4 well enough, but it’s not a pro level lens – that’s probably why I was having a hard time selling it. Now what I will say though, is that it’s not too heavy to lug around, it does give you a fair amount of reach, is fairly sharp, and I also like the manual focus clutch – which I used on more than one occasion today.
These images were processed using Lightroom, and resized to 2400 pixels wide with a compression setting of 40 on export.
