The lens is big, heavy and superb and I am happy and broke :-)
I got more and more tired of carrying a backpack with prime lenses and exchanging them all the time. I have this baby on my camera now and I won't need to take it off much. My freshly cleaned image sensor will be happy about not seeing so much dust anymore and after doing a number of comparison shoots, I can tell that this lens outperforms everything I have in that focal range. With it's maximum aperture of 2.8 all the way from 24mm to 70mm and it's macro focus range, it will basically open a new little world to me.
Look at these sentences, maybe I should start a career in advertising.
So I took it to this balloon fest last Saturday to see what it feels like to use it. The zooming-by-walking, or even worse, zooming-by-lens-exchanging times are over. Regarding the optical resolution and sharpness, I have this picture with two magnified cut-outs to show what it can do on my 20D.
So what about the hot air balloon ride? Well, it was just another highlight this weekend. The ride was actually not that long (about 20 minutes to half an hour), but I was still high hours later (anybody got that pun? Fantastic, right? :-)).
A couple of things came unexpected to me, though. For example that the pilot usually doesn't know exactly where the wind would bring us and no clue about where we would land - he didn't even know the area. So while up in the sky and trying to spot a good location for a landing, I was kind of surprised that something like this exists in this country. A place where people think going 65mph is going fast and you're used to be supervised by at least two live guards while trying to swim in a pool that is as high as your knees :)