What lens to buy?

I am often asked via email or via various forums, what lens to buy. Of course it depends greatly on what budget you have and what purpose for which you intend to use the lens. Firstly on budget. My advice is always "by the best you can afford". While there are many photographers who take superb images with cheapie lenses, they are very few and far between! With the exception of the reasonably priced Canon 100 f/2.8 macro, all my lenses are "L" lenses and for one main reason. They are good. And secondly, they hold their price. I have bought and sold camera bodies over the past ten years and they do not hold their price. My first digital SLR camera was the Canon D60 and I went to great lengths to find one. I eventually tracked one down to a CameraHouse store in Hobart. They were the only store in Australia which had this much sought after camera. I paid the extraordinary price of A$5,200 - for a six megapixel camera with the dubious distinction of being one of the most "noisy" (grainy) cameras on the market. But it was a good introduction to digital SLR photography. I have since bought (and sold) the Canon 20D, Canon 5D (the first full frame dslr) and now I have superb Canon 5DII which hopefully will last me for a long time..unless...no never mind!

Back to lenses. I don't shoot a great deal of landscapes, but I have had the Canon 17-40 f/4 L for as long as I have had digital cameras. Its clearly one of the best landscape lenses and is very reasonably priced (for an L lens). While one may not like the "distortion" one gets with this lens on a full frame camera, I love it. For portraits, you cannot go past the Canon 135 f/2 L, one of the best prime lenses that Canon has produced. For a walkabout lens, I have the Canon 24-70 f/2.8 L and its rarely off my 5DII. Its great for assignments also. I also have the Canon 70-200 f/4 L IS telephoto zoom lens which is also good for portraiture and even good for landscapes. I used to have the non-IS version and to be honest, I cannot find a great deal of difference between both versions. For zoo shots, my lens of choice is the Canon 300 f/4 L IS, a tad heavy but an excellent lens. It was one of my first L lenses. For macro work, of which I do little, I have my only non-L lens but the Canon 100 f/2.8 macro holds its ground amongst its L brothers! It's also good for portraits. You can find my various galleries dedicated to Canon lenses on Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 5D and Canon 20D.  You can also find reviews of most cameras and lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus et al) on review site at Fred Miranda

Another image theft

Through Tineye this morning, I found yet another theft of my work on a website of a French journalist (who should surely know better). I have sent her an email and await her explanation as to why she neglected to either approach me for image use and/or asked me for my fee for its use. The image in question is the image below of the sulphur crested cockatoo in flight. I'll post the results in my next blog.

**Image theft*

On Fair Trade Photography blog Chris Barton found multiple companies using the same stock image by using the image search engine called TinEye. I thought I would relate here my experience with TinEye finding an image of mine. A couple of years back, I had a bit of time to spare so I was going through my online images to see if any of them were appearing on websites. For this I used TinEye. I came across one image of a young woman with a black umbrella on a beach with her little dog. I was surprised when TinEye,a Toronto based company, came up with a hit! It was a Romanian library which showed that my image was on the front cover of a book. With a little detective work, I found that the publisher was a large company based in Bucharest. As they had never paid for, or even contacted me for use, I sent them an email advising that they were infringing my copyright and before I took legal action, I would like an explanation from them. Surprisingly, almost immediately I received a most apologetic letter from one of their directors, advising that they are "a very respectable and serious publishing house, having published many top rank authors and titles. However, as in any active and busy editorial office, it is possible that such an incident had occurred with our graphics department" They did have the time to crop and remove the watermark though! After much negotiations (and with a threat by me to retain a Bucharest law firm), we arrived at 1,000 euros (A$1,700). I had contacted a Bucharest law firm who advised me that under Romanian law, general damages for illegal use would be around three times the fee had they bought the image in the first place. Here in Australia, its normally around five times the price. But rather than argue the toss, I accepted their offer of 1,000 euros. Apparently word got out and I received a telephone call from a Canadian newspaper who interviewed me regarding the infringement and my pursuit of the publisher. An article appeared in several Canadian newspapers.

TinEye searches around 1.3 billion sites and admits it has a long way to go to index all websites. As an aside, one image of mine, of a young attractive woman dressed in hijab is on 29 Islamic blogs. I don't have any real problem with blogs using my images as most of the time, there is no commercial use but I draw the line at publishers. I felt I was lucky that the publisher came to the party which is more than can be said for a US based website which still has one of my images on its site and refuses to respond to my emails for its withdrawal. Maybe one day I will take the time to submit a DMA notice for its removal.

**After dinner musings**

While my husband happily tinkers in his garage (or shed as he affectionately calls it), I sit on our deck after dinner with a glass of Australian chardonnay (no, I have not yet acquired the taste for the latest fad of sauvignon blanc) in my hand and watch hundreds of flying foxes (or fruit bats which are the world's largest bats) meander through the sky advancing on fruit or flower bearing trees nearby. Silently they fly, sometimes being noisily upstaged by sulphur crested cockatoos screeching their way to the garden of our friends half a kilometre away where they will keep them awake and most of their neighbours. I sit in my "pod" chair which I call my cogitating chair and wonder at my most fortunate life in this most beautiful country in the world and the most beautiful suburb of this most beautiful city etc etc. Our beloved one-eyed cat sits in the lounging wanting to join me outside but he and his brother are restricted to being inside at night as we have a plethora of small wildlife in our garden (the endangered long nosed bandicoot, small ringtail possums and the occasional rat - well, they can't help being rodents!) The brushtail possums, of which there are many, are not threatened by the cats as they are fairly large and can certainly look after themselves. They live in the possum boxes that we, and our neighbours, have installed in the gum trees in our gardens and while still classified as "wild" have all the conveniences of domestic animals. They are housed, fed and even taken to the vet on the odd occasion. One of our matriarchs, who has long gone, even let us remove ticks from her back, us being ignorant of the fact that ticks, although dangerous to dogs and cats, are not a problem for brushtails. The current matriarch, H,(a one eyed possum) has been visiting us for around eleven years. She is long past her due by date but every night she turns up, stands to her full height and scratches on our verandah window and we feed her bananas. My husband is restricted to tinkering with his motorcycles as he has broken his collar bone (for the third time..first two times the right and now the left) while riding down through the high country of New South Wales to attend the SuperBikes at Phillip Island. He didn't make it last year as well as he was knocked off his bike two days before by a blonde in a Beamer who neglected to check in her mirror for motorcyclists - but thats another story.

The sun has now set. In this part of the world, we do not have a long twilight as Europe does. Our sun plonks down over the horizon in a couple of minutes like a cherry in a glass of vermouth and its now dark. I can still hear the bats who are now chattering in the palm trees in our garden. And so another day in paradise ends. Cheers