DIY Photography

Your one stop shop for everything photo-video

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

Roger Cicala

Tearing down Canon’s new 600mm f/11 telephoto lens

Aug 24, 2020 by John Aldred Add Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Canon’s RF 600mm f/11 IS STM lens is tiny. At least, it is when you compare it to the typical 600mm lenses that wildlife and sports shooters use. It’s also super lightweight, coming in at around 2lb (930g) and costs a mere $699. Sure, its f/11 max aperture is hitting “diffraction territory” but for social media, it’s plenty good enough.

At least, that’s the thought that convinced Roger Cicala at LensRentals to buy the RF 600mm f/11 IS STM lens. It’s not a lens he needs often, but he regularly spends time near a lot of wildlife and wanted a lightweight lens to take with him. Naturally, after all, he’s Roger Cicala, the lens was dismantled pretty much as soon as it arrived.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

How to thoroughly disinfect your camera and workspace

Mar 24, 2020 by Dunja Djudjic 1 Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

The coronavirus pandemic has made us wash our hands a gazillion times a day and taught us to (finally) stop touching our faces. But our cameras are in contact with both our faces and our hands. So, it’s important to keep them clean and disinfected, too.

DIYP’s Dave Williams wrote about it in a recent article, and our friends from Lensrentals are sharing a few more tips that you’ll find useful. Other than disinfecting your camera, they also teach you how to do it with your workspace, and make sure to take their advice and keep your gear and space clean.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Lensrentals found a dead fly inside a weather sealed Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens

Apr 12, 2019 by Dunja Djudjic 3 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

A weather-sealed lens shouldn’t let any dust, sand, moisture or other elements inside of it. But weather-sealed doesn’t make it sealed against insects, apparently. Roger and Aaron from Lensrentals recently had a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens dismantled to remove a dead fly from it. Now that’s what I call a bug fix!

Other than removing the fly, Roger and Aaron tested the lens out to see how it affects the image. And surprisingly enough, a dead bug inside a 70-200mm lens doesn’t affect the image quality nearly as much as one would have thought.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

About Getting Your Camera Wet… Teardown of a Salty Sony A7sII

Nov 9, 2017 by Roger Cicala 1 Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

People think that because I expect the worst and try to prepare for it, that I’m negative. That’s not it at all. I’m not a negative person; I’m cheerfully cynical. If I expect the worst and it doesn’t happen, I’m happy because things went better than I expected. If I expect the worst and it does happen, I’m happy, because I can tell everyone, “See, I told you this would happen.” So I expect the worst because that keeps me happy.

This post is a superb example of why expecting the worst is reasonable. There are all kinds of badness in this one post. There’s nothing good here at all. Well, except for Aaron’s disassembly. That’s very good. Everything else here is about mistakes.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Trending Quizzes

DIYP Quiz: So, you think you know film cameras?

quiz film camera from the back

DIYP Quiz: Cameras in the movies

diyp quiz cameras movies

DIYP Quiz: How much storage does it have?

diyp quiz how much storage

more quizzes

What Actually Happens When You Stop Down a Lens

Jan 27, 2016 by Roger Cicala 1 Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

I got an email the other day that got me thinking. A guy simply asked “How far do I have to stop down a lens to get maximum performance. I’ve heard two stops from wide open. I’ve heard down to f/8. Which is correct?”

I asked him which lens he was referring to, and was he talking about the center point, corners, or overall. He didn’t realize that it mattered. He thought all lenses were the same and had this idea that eventually there was an aperture where the lens was maximally sharp and the corners were as sharp as the center. At this point, I realized there was no way I could tell him everything he needed to know in an email and I decided to write a blog post about it.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Teardown Of a Canon 35mm f/1.4 Mk II Shows Its Tank-Like Build Quality

Dec 10, 2015 by Roger Cicala 2 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

As soon as we optically tested the Canon 35mm f/1.4 Mk II lens we couldn’t wait to tear into one for a couple of reasons. One was that Canon has been making a lot of interesting advances in lens mechanics lately, so we’re always excited to look inside their new lenses. Another was that Canon claimed this lens had increased weather resistance and durability. You know I’m pretty cynical about claims like that until I see what’s inside for myself. And finally, well, it’s been really busy all fall and Aaron and I really just haven’t had time to tear apart some new lenses, so we were having withdrawal.

We got a little time this week, so we used it to take apart the new Canon 35mm f/1.4 Mk II. Those of you who like to follow along from home with your own lens go get your #2 JIS screwdriver and a spanner wrench and let’s get to work!

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Canon 5Ds Teardown

Jun 19, 2015 by Roger Cicala 1 Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

When Lensrentals.com first got the first Canon 5Ds and 5D sr cameras in stock, Aaron and I immediately started screaming that we wanted to take one apart. It turns out we received enough 5Ds cameras to let us have a day with one to do just that. Of course, we don’t expect to find out anything amazing and revealing. We expect it will look pretty much like the Canon 5DIII and 7DII on the inside. But hey, you never know. Plus we’ll be repairing these soon enough, so we might as well find our way around now.

If you want to do some comparisons yourself, you can compare this to our Canon 5D III teardown and Canon 7D II teardown. Or if you’d rather follow along from home with your own 5Ds go grab your screwdrivers and let’s get started!

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Canon 5DS and 5DS R Initial Resolution Tests

Jun 16, 2015 by Roger Cicala Add Comment
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Like everybody else, we’re pretty excited to get our hands on Canon’s new 5DS and 5DS R. There are already a lot of hands-on articles about the cameras that probably have told you more than you need to know to make your purchase decision. Of course, for most of the Canon shooters who read this blog, the purchase decision was just which place you want to buy it from.

For me, I want some lab data to see just how much of a difference those megapixels make. More particularly, I want to see how much of a difference they make when shot through a reasonably good lens, an excellent lens, and an adequate lens. Some people want to simplify things too much and claim certain lenses are ‘good enough’ for the new cameras and others aren’t. It’s not that simple.

So we begged and threw temper tantrums until Drew agreed to let us have a couple of the new cameras for a couple of days testing in our Imatest lab. That was enough time for us to get a quick overview using several different sample lenses, but it will be months before we have a good database of which lenses are most capable on the new cameras.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Weather Sealed Lens With a Fly Inside

Jun 11, 2015 by Roger Cicala 4 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

I’ve been blogging about testing and taking apart camera equipment for almost a decade. Lensrentals.com has many thousand lenses these days, and they all get used frequently. When you have lots of lenses and they get used frequently, stuff gets inside them.

Usually the stuff that gets inside is dust. Our repair techs open up and clean dust out of more than 100 lenses a week. Not because the dust matters a bit in a photograph; it doesn’t. But because people still seem to think it does. People also, for reasons I can’t understand, seem to think that weather sealed lenses are less likely to get dust in them than non-weather sealed lenses. I’m not sure why they think this, but they do.

Sometimes the stuff that gets inside them is interesting and we get to blog about it. We found a spider, complete with web, inside a lens once and yesterday we got to add a new item to our ‘found inside lenses’ collection; a nice, fat, fly. And not just a fly inside a lens, but one way down deep inside a weather sealed lens. So deep that it took 4 hours of work to get it out.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Sony’s New FE 90mm f/2.8 Macro Lens Takes On Canon’s 100mm f/2.8 In Lensrentals’ Resolution TEst

May 5, 2015 by Roger Cicala 2 Comments
  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

We got a pre-release set of Sony FE 90mm f/2.8 G OSS Macro lenses in for preliminary testing last week, and I was kind of excited about this lens for a couple of reasons. First it simply gives me a nice short telephoto prime option that has been lacking in the lineup (although the Zeiss 85mm Batis lens will be coming along fairly soon). Second, it gives me a true macro lens at the focal length I prefer.

I hoped that the combination of a good macro lens with the A7r sensor would turn out to be a winner. We used our Imatest lab to compare Sony 90mm f/2.8 G OSS lenses mounted to Sony A7r cameras, and compared them with Canon 100mm f/2.8 IS Macro lenses shot on Canon 5DIII cameras in our Imatest lab. (For those who are curious, we can’t test Sony E mount lenses on an optical bench because the electromagnetic focus system requires electrical power to operate. Until we do some really geeky, overly complex engineering modifications, the optical bench isn’t an option for Sony E mount lenses.) It would have been nice to also compare with a Nikon D810 and Nikon 105 f/2.8 Micro lens, I know, but our time is limited.

[Read More…]

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • Opticull uses AI to cull out duplicates, blurry and photos with blinking people
  • Pentax K3 monochrome review – what a great camera!
  • Aputure’s F14 Fresnel Lens is motorised for remote focus control
  • The Aputure Electro Storm XT26 is a 2600 watts bi color beast LED light
  • Aputure Electro Storm CS15 is an IP65 rated 1500 Watt RGBWW LED light

Udi Tirosh: from diyphotography.netUdi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.

Alex Baker: from diyphotography.netAlex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

David Williams: from diyphotography.netDave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred: from diyphotography.netJohn Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic: from diyphotography.netDunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy