My first journal entry, yay!

It could be my copy, but the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 II kit lens sucks so much I'm thinking about the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f2.8 IS USM as a replacement. But since that's a pricey bit of kit, I'll have to wait a month or two. According to reviews [link] [link] [link] it has equal or better image quality to the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM plus it's more flexible (f2.8 instead of f4) AND it has the fabulous IS.

So what's wrong with the 18-55mm? Well, for starters it's horribly soft. This could be due to the AF and I'll deffo try MF soonish to see if that helps any. Another thing is contrast. There's quite a difference in contrast between my 18-55 and 70-300. Of course that's comparing a €50 lens to a €600 lens (duh). There's some barreling at 18mm and given the wrong circumstances you notice quite some CA. I'm very interested to hear if other people have different results.

So far my only lens outside the kit lens is the Canon EF 70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM which is a great lens, nice and sharp and IS works wonders. It's a heavy sucker though but on the other hand that helps keep things steady when shooting from the hip, making it even more useful in low light conditions.

I hope to round out my collection of lenses with the Canon EF-S 10-22mm F3.5-4.5 USM. Yes it's an EF-S lens but I don't think I'll be upgrading to a fullsize sensor any time soon. So that's no disadvantage to me. There's nothing from Canon, Tamron or Sigma that comes close.

I have a 58mm B+W F-Pro CP but the 10-22 and the 17-55 both need a 77mm filter. At the wide angle side the 10-22 would show the edges of a normal filter, so I would ideally need a slim filter for that . Add to that a couple of ND and ND Grad filters (58mm, 77mm and 77mm slim of 2-3 densities) and my financial problems become frighteningly clear...

On the upside, I recently acquired a great Lowepro backpack [link] to hoist my camera gear around! It even holds my tripod and there's lots of room to spare right now .

If anyone reads this at all, thank you and any views on lens/filter choices are welcome! If not, I'm talking to myself again...