Photography Gears

Canon T5i. Good camera for its price, especially a refurbished one with a kit lens for less than $300 during last year’s Black Friday sale. Mine was a refurb and it’s been excellent. A rule of thumb is that a refurbished camera is fine while a refurbished lens may not be. Copy to copy variations in lenses, especially third party ones, are difficult to re-calibrate. One significant disadvantage of cameras lower than the 70D is the lack of auto-focus microadjustment (AF microadjustment). Not every lens has the perfect focus on wherever you intended on every camera. Sometimes the focus point is further away than your viewfinder indicated, and sometimes closer. On Canon cameras above the 70D line, you can quickly adjust for every lens and the camera remembers them every time you put on that lens. However, on T6 (T6i, T6s) and below, you do not get this function.
Canon 5D mark III. Excellent camera. Easy to use. Now not as good as competition in dynamic range.

Canon EFS 10-18mm lens. Good lens, somewhat more distortion than I would like.
Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. Good lens for the price when on sale, quick focus, excellent color rendering.
Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM. Excellent lens, sharp corner to corner. The color rendering produces slightly faded feel in JPEG. Keep shooting in raw!
Tamron SP 24-70mm f/2.8 DI VC USD. Troublesome focus from the beginning. Repaired numerous times. Tamron replaced a copy, still have issues. Give real clean image when “on”. A friend got a “good copy” and it’s excellent.
Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art Lens. Got it last Thanksgiving with $100 off. The best lens I have ever tried. Could not take off my camera. Sharp wide open. I even use it for landscape. Produce such clean, sharp, life-like image. Reproduce exactly what you see!