This afternoon we went to the Kiekenhoef park in Sint Oedenrode, which is about 15 miles from where we live. I wanted to check it out as a potential location for a photo shoot.

I thought it would be fun as well to take some photos of the kids there. But, I found out again today that it is pretty difficult to take good photos of your own kids. You have to continually watch them, make sure they don’t run the wrong way, walk into the water or fall of a playground toy. Taking photos comes in second place. And, when you’re finally ready to take a photo and you ask them to look your way, they will ignore you as usual.

I love my kids of course and luckily they don’t always ignore me, but it sure is a challenge to do a photo shoot with them.

(the remainder of this post is probably only interesting for photographers, so if you want you can stop reading here.)

I also wanted to test out my Canon EF 80-200mm f/2.8 L lens on a full-frame body. They problem is that I don’t own a digital full-frame camera. I only have one digital SLR at the moment and it’s a crop, APS-C, body. But, I do have a Canon ESO 650 camera. That’s a 35 mm film camera, and therefore full-frame. So, I bought a couple of roles of film for my EOS 650 and mounted the 80-200mm on it to see how it performs.

They 80-200mm L lens is really a super lens by the way. Very sharp, even at f2.8, as Bob Atkins also mentiones in this articel. The focal length range of the lens is a bit on the long side on a crop body though. On a body with a 1.6x crop factor, the range is equal to a full-frame equivalent 128-320mm. Not exactly the perfect lens for portrait shoots.

On a full-frame body however the range is very nice. The short end of the lens didn’t feel too long as it does on the crop body. 80mm on full-frame is a focal length that I am very used to because it is equal to 50mm on a crop body ,and I make most my photos with a 50mm lens on my APS-C camera.

To make a long story short. I am happy that I got to test my 80-200mm L on a full-frame body today. Even though I will have to wait a while to see the photos I took, because I first need to have the film developed, I already do know that I will start using this lens a lot more when I buy a full-frame digital SLR.

I could also write some more about the Canon EOS 650 and shooting with a film camera in general by the way. I noticed today that this is something completely different from shooting digital. But, to not make this post too long I’ll try and do a post about that next week.

Here’s a photo of Ella in the park.