Magpie Meets Canon 100-400mm Lens

Update April 2: Yesterday was April Fool’s Day. I’m not selling my Canon gear (blame the idea on Art Morris, the world class bird photographer). My apologies to the people who wrote and wanted to buy my Canon gear. The Canon history in between the first and last paragraphs is accurate and I really did buy my first autofocus lens long before I bought my first autofocus body.

I have been so impressed with the latest Nikon cameras (which have edged out Canon in the technology race) that I’ve decided to switch to Nikon gear. It was a hard decision.

I bought my first Canon camera in 1984, the Canon F-1n (a manual focus, manual metering workhorse) and a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 lens to go with it. Other lenses eventually followed. I took some of my first published images with the F-1 (along with a Canon AE-1 that I bought in a pawn shop for $119 as a backup camera).

Years later I bought my first Canon autofocus lens (a used EF 50mm f/1.8) before I even owned an autofocus camera because it was better than the new Canon version that had just come out (the new version had no distance scale or depth of field scale and felt very plasticy).  I knew I would eventually get an autofocus body when the autofocus was up to my standards. That eventually happened and I bought a Canon Elan IIe (with the eye controlled focus point) and later an EOS 3. More lenses followed.

I was slow to switch to digital because the early digital images were no match for my carefully crafted transparencies on Fuijchrome Velvia and Kodachrome Professional 25 (and the publishers I worked with wouldn’t accept the image quality from the earliest digital cameras). But I finally gave in when the Canon 10D came out and the Canon 20D was a big improvement over the 10D. I was initially shooting film and digital side by side, but I was soon shooting more and more digital images and my film usage started to plummet. I have slowly upgraded to better Canon technology as it has come out and my current primary camera is a Canon 5D Mark III.

But Nikon has changed all of that. I will keep a little of my Canon gear for sentimental reasons, but I am selling the rest at reasonable prices in order to afford the Nikon cameras and lenses I will be acquiring. It is a good decision, but not without some pain. I’ve been with Canon a long time.