An afternoon walk through Mount Douglas park with a new lens

Recently I had the pleasure of going on a hike around Mount Douglas Park, here in the District of Saanich, in order to test a lens I’ve just acquired, Canon’s RF 28-70 F2.8 IS STM. The lens is a welcome addition to the brand’s RF line of lenses and, much to the satisfaction of many, it falls in the middle of the range, making it more accessible to photographers who do not wish to pay the premium attached to Canon’s professional line of L series lenses. In spite of this, it features the same weather sealing and image stabilization of the L series, minus the ultra-sonic motor more commonly featured in the professional line. When paired with a compatible RF-series camera body, it allows for combined image stabilization between the lens and the camera, offering unprecedented stabilization and this is, undoubtedly, a tremendous benefit to the professional photographer.

However, this lens does feature heavy-to-extreme distortion at the wind end of the focal range and relies on either in-camera corrections or the corresponding lens profiles applied during post-processing in order to correct for the distortion and, just as well, chromatic aberrations. (In my case, I use Adobe Lightroom Classic.) Nevertheless, I was very pleased with the corrected results. Offering a focal range of 28-70 mm, I will be using it primarily for event photography, although it does have a place in studio portraiture (including headshot photography) and outdoor branding portraiture. That being said, for outdoor fashion or fine art photography, the maximum aperture of 2.8 may be, for some, too restrictive.

I’ve already had the chance to use the lens during two studio headshot sessions, as well as during a corporate event. It performed well. All in all, I am very pleased with the purchase and have no intention to return it, or sell it, anytime soon. Below are some of the post-processed results from the corporate event (taken with an R6 Mark II camera body and a Godox V1C flash unit used on-camera and set to E-TTL.)

As for my walk, here are a couple of photos taken with the lens and my Canon R6 Mark II camera body.