Most people only ever use the lens that their camera came with, and usually this is a prime 50mm lens. But there are some great lenses out there for making your film photography more versatile and changing the way you take images.

The Canon 100-200mm f/5.6 lens is one of the bigger lenses you can buy (see the image above). 

It can zoom from 100mm to 200mm and always keeps f/5.6 as its maximum aperture. Some zoom lenses have a variable aperture where as you zoom, the maximum aperture of the lens becomes smaller. This is seen in the title of the lens being f/4.5-5.6. 

100mm to 200mm is the focal length of the lens. Focal length refers to the distance from the focal plane of the camera (where your negative is) to where light rays converge within the lens to create a sharp image. 

Focal length figures inform us of the angle of view and the magnification of the frame. 

The longer the focal length, the more magnification the lens has, and the less will be visible in the frame.

This all sounds very complicated, but it is a lot simpler when put into practice.

It is much easier to understand how far this lens zooms when displayed using images, so we have several images here to display what these focal lengths look like.

All of these images were taken from the same spot and were taken with the Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, and the Canon 100-200mm f/5.6 lens.

View of the ocean taken with a 50mm focal length lens

View of the ocean taken with the 100mm focal length

View of the ocean taken with the 200mm focal length

You can see that the length and zoom of the lens drastically changes what your frame can be focused on.

Having a zoom lens available to use was a lot of fun, and I ended up taking some images that would have been impossible to take without the lens. 

I'll admit, the size of this lens doesn't make it one you want to carry around with you all the time, but once it was in a backpack when not using it, you barely noticed that it was there.

I thought the images were quite sharp, but not as sharp as I expected them to be. The lens definitely performed better at the 100mm focal length than the 200mm length. This was, however, my first time using Cinestill 400D film, so that may have played a part in the outcome of the images.

For the price of this lens, it makes a great addition to your kit as an option to use when you are out doing your photography. 

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