EF 300mm f/2.8 Bokeh

I was interested in seeing how this lens works at f/2.8, and how the out of focus areas look. Just a quick experiment to see how the lens performs; how the bokeh looks, and if there’s any chromatic aberration visible.

Here’s a couple images. The first is all natural light. The second is with a bit of fill flash.

I like the look of the backgrounds in both the natural light and fill flash images. Very smooth, and I like the light circles.

The image below is one I used to test the edges of leaves for chromatic aberration. I found some (minimal), but only around the edges, and easily removed it with Lightroom.

At 200%, you’ll see slight Chromatic Aberration in the first leaf sample below, and the corrected leaf sample below it. Anything I saw was only at the edges, and was very minimal.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the bokeh created with this lens. It’s an original EF 300, not a newer version with IS, but the glass is very good and produces some nice qualities in images taken with it. I’ve read that the newer versions with IS are as good as far as image quality and bokeh goes. This is a very nice lens, although it is a bit large. If you need 300mm and want f/2.8, you’ll not get a small or light lens.