Are your images stabilized?

Well, its 17th of may, Norways national day. Hurrah! Today there is going to be tons of people in the city today, but the weather seems a bit bleak for photography. Although I do like photographying in overcast days too, thats when closeups and macros are really nice. But for casual shooting nothing beats having an Image Stabilized lens around, or IS lens for short. Canon has a range of IS lenses now and it almost seems to be standard on the zooms and long primes now. I never thought I would be able to take photos hand held at 300mm or that is actually 480mm in 10D terms (due to the 1.6 crop factor). As you might know the golden rule is that you need a shutter speed of 1/mm so if your zoom is at 300 you need 1/300 or higher to avoid camera shake ruining your picture. Well, with IS lenses you can drop that by 2 stops, on some canon lenses they claim up to 3 stops. Actually if you shoot a series like 3-4 pictures your chances are that you will get sharp shots 4 stops below that "rule of thumb". So it is almost possible to shoot at 1/30 and still get sharp pictures. But remember that you are often shooting at the widest aperture of the lens, and unless you really need that small depth of field (DOF) you are wise to stop down to f8 or f11 which is often where the lenses perform the best. The Canon 75-300mm IS is very soft wide open at 300mm so I usually get better results by stopping down 2 stops to f8 and make sure that I am above 3 stops below the 1/mm golden rule. Although the IS is often said to be unecessary for zooms like the Canon 28-135mm IS, I think it gives the images that little extra edge, and that zoom is a great lens if you want to upgrade your zoom in the similar range. Canons 24-70mm L f2.8 does not have IS yet but maybe the next version will, so I am waiting some more to get that one. The 70-200mm L f2.8 IS is what I want now to replace my 75-300mm, and after using IS in that range I couldnt go for the non IS version of the 70-200mm.

Finally if you are shooting and want to avoid camera shake, nothing beats a tripod. In some cases, when you are faced with an incredible vista in front of you, you need to stop down to f22 to get everything sharp. From the little pebble in front of your camera to the snowdrift on top of that mountain in the background. I often shoot closer to the ground when I take wide angle shots to get that feeling of depth. You need a tripod in these cases, and although its a pain lugging that big piece of metal around, it will greatly increase the quality of your images. At least for sharpness, it wont do anything about your composition skills. :-)