Grant Atkinson is not only one of the leading wildlife photographers in the country, but also an authority when it comes to new gear, with many reviews appearing on his site. TechSmart asked him about the best stuff that he recently played around with.  

Grant Atkinson: I have been shooting with the late 2014 release Canon EF 100-400L f4.5-5.6 IS II telephoto zoom lens with fantastic results. For the kind of wildlife photography that I do, the focal length range is almost perfect and adequately covers most of my needs.

This new lens focuses very fast, is easy to handhold and has a very light but smooth and controlled zoom action which can be adjusted. It also produces images that are very close in sharpness and overall quality to those that I get when using much more expensive, heavier, fixed super telephoto lenses.

It’s also a very quiet lens to use, since the autofocus and image stabilisation are barely audible, and the zoom action is smooth and easily moved from wide to tele with one twist of the wrist. Quiet matters to me when I am hoping to get as close as possible to wildlife subjects, without scaring them off. In these situations, pairing the new 100-400 with my Canon EOS 5D mk3 set in Silent Continuous Drive gives me a combination that is ultra-stealthy.

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