I have three more lenses to practise with on the Canon. First of them is the standard ‘kit’ lens; 18-55, which is an unremarkable performer by anyone’s standards.


On the whole, not awful. But of course mostly shot at the 55mm end as I rarely use wide-angle. Or even short telephoto.
The second lens is the heavily used 75-300mm which is a bit stiff in the zoom and doesn’t render quite as good as we’d want. But it’s still not bad.


The third lens is the 40mm ‘prime pancake’, which is a very odd focal length for either full frame or APS-C. But the lens itself is quite sharp and a decent performer.


So … what have I learned from this?
1). The Canon is easier for me to use (even discounting the Nikon’s increasing defects) because I can see the view more easily.
2). The Canon is more difficult to use because of the need to swap lenses to get even close to the Nikon’s range of focal length (due to the difference in sensor sizes).
3). I would need a much longer zoom lens (like 600mm at least) to come close to the range I normally use for wildlife shots, and those cost a lot of money.
4). I would need to slow down my shooting style because the Canon can’t ‘shift modes’ as quickly as the Nikon, and the general use of it requires more time – especially with swapping lenses.
There is no perfect way to go because they don’t make an ‘ideal’ camera design for my needs. A 4/3s camera like the Olympus E410 I have would be close, but there are very few lenses for it. The modern micro 4/3s cameras don’t have optical viewfinders, so they would not be good with my eyesight (even my Sony a6000’s finder is too small and too dim). Since the only choice I have is to use the optical finder cameras I already have, I’ll go with that.
More slowly, more carefully, and more to come.