I wrote recently about a wonderful trip to the Tuscany area of Italy.  In preparation for that trip I debated extensively about which camera system I should take.  My preference was the PhaseOne p65 system, but I felt shooting in the hilltop villages would be better suited to my Canon gear, where I had a wider selection of lenses available.  Alitalia Air had some pretty restrictive carry on requirements listed on their website (1 single carry on, 12 lbs maximum).  Finally I settled on the Canon system, and managed to get a backpack complete with camera, a few lenses, and my 13” laptop down to about 20 lbs.

My fears were unfounded ... every flight was full of people with normal carry on’s as though it was  just another Delta flight.  The Phase system would have been fine ... however, the challenge of using medium format in the villages was still a concern, so I still didn’t feel bad about taking the Canon gear.

I don’t use the Canon gear all that much.  I prefer it for portraits, as it has plenty of  resolution and better ISO performance.  But for landscapes I only use it when doing telephoto work (not often) or when it seems the easier system to carry.

I guess I have a “trust” of professional quality camera equipment.  I’ve never really had a problem with a lens “going bad” unless I physically damaged it.  Once shooting in LaJolla a fall left my 100-400mm in two pieces, and only later did I find out it knocked my 1Ds sensor out of alignment.  Unfortunately because of this “trust” I didn’t really do any testing to make sure my gear was up to the task of a landscape shoot.

I didn’t notice it at first, but a day or two in while working on some images I noticed some odd artifacts that just didn’t make sense.  I was using my 70-300 DO, which had just recently been repaired by Canon.  I decided I would switch to the 70-200L f/2.8 which had always been a great lens for me.  I calibrated the focus to maximize sharpness.  Unfortunately while on the road I rarely do more than rate and sort images into collections in Lightroom, and I didn’t look at many images closely until I got home.  That’s when I discovered this lens was actually performing worse than the first ... the entire left side of every image was blurry.  The problem was quite inconsistent, some images seemed pretty good, others seemed terrible.  The use of the 1.4 extender didn’t seem to help or hurt.

Here are 100% details from the above shot, comparing the rolls of hay.

I set the lens up at home and using 10x Live View focusing found there was no way to get the left side of the image anywhere close to sharp.  Nothing I could do would bring it into focus, and when the center of the image was sharp the right side of the image wasn’t too great either.

I sent the lens off to Canon, and a couple of weeks later it returned.  A quick live view focus test  showed substantial improvement ...even at 2.8 the entire field was decently sharp once the middle was focused.  The paperwork showed Canon replace the IS optical lens assembly ... which is what I suspected was causing the problem.  Apparently it was broken and loose, so the affect on the image just depended on where it happened to be at the time.

The 70-300 still seems to have an issue so it might go back to Canon again.  But lesson learned ... when traveling on such an extensive trip specifically to take photographs, it’s probably best to thoroughly check out the gear well in advance.