I went & did it this week.

On Monday I drove about 90 miles to collect a new lens. This really is the dream lens for me. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase a real top quality lens in the form of the Canon 600mm F4 L.

This is one hell of a beast. It weighs more than a small child, well, five & a half kilograms. This means that it really isn’t hand-holdable.

I tried it in the garden when I got back & got some nice images of some of the birds on the feeders. I used a tripod for this. I bought a Manfrotto 393 head which is a balanced gimbal affair. Once the lens is mounted & balanced you can more or less point it in whatever angle & direction you want & the lens will stay there. Early results with it are pretty favourable, you can literally move & operate the camera with one hand. It seems to work really well on the monopod.

The cost of this lens is pretty prohibitable. If it wasn’t for a recent ‘windfall’ I’d never be able to afford one.

Canon, Nikon & some of the other major manufacturers are putting their prices up. Apparently this is due to the current weakness of the pound.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of the beast for several weeks, if not months. Warehouse Express were offering it for about £5,400 two or three weeks ago. This crept up to £5,999 up to about a week or so ago. A day or two before I purchased mine, they put the price up to £6,499. I just checked before writing this entry & they have it on their site for an eye-watering £7,129.

Fortunately I didn’t buy it from W.E. and so got it for a much more reasonable price!

More info & pics to come…