God’s optical gift to earth. Every image on this page was shot using this lens.

There’s a reason you most likely know someone who has a mug of this lens. Ok sure, maybe it’s just about the perfect size to be a travel mug… but hear me out. I personally put this lens on the pedestal of 21st century achievement alongside the iPhone and Google Maps (I’m still waiting as of writing this review to see how ChatGPT pans out). If I’m headed out the door with the intention to take photos, and don’t want to haul a bunch of shit with me, I have some random camera body and this lens. Sure sometimes I’ll “creatively challenge” myself by taking a prime, or know I’ll be operating in some edge case where I need better light gathering ability than f4. Maybe I want to travel extra light so I’ll grab some mirrorless toy lens. But I’ll probably wish the whole damn time I had my 24-105.

To start, it’s THE perfect focal range. 24mm is plenty wide. I have wider lenses but writing this makes me start to question why. Things beyond 24mm get weird man. Sometimes in a fun way, most of the time in a manner that makes you feel a little sick when looking back at your images. Wide-angles are a bit like alcohol, fun in moderation, but don’t make it your entire personality. Shooting wider than 24mm becomes a mental exercise. I find it near impossible to keep lines straight. Perspectives become distorted. Things which are not that far away look miles away – a neat party trick for sure but I am not a surrealist – I want to capture things the way I see them and 24mm is really good at that. On the off chance I do want to go a bit wider I can just flip vertical and fire a panorama which gets me to about 16mm. Plenty, plenty, wide.

On the flip 105mm is to telephoto as 24mm is to wide-angle. You get fantastic compression with landscapes but it’s not yet enough to screw up a human face. I can get close enough to more friendly wildlife without needing to carry a cumbersome dedicated telephoto lens. I need some more focal length? I can just grab a higher resolution body like the 5DSR and crop easily to 200mm. Hell, even cropping into an 18MP 1DC gives me just fine results.

Oh yeah and you got every. single. damn. focal length in between. 28, 35, 50, 85, 29.4, 52.7, 98.6. Oh and to get there, you don’t have to change lenses. Changing lenses you WILL miss shots. Sure with a prime you can just walk closer or further back, but this implies 1: you can. 2: you don’t think about how compression will play into making your images.

Let’s talk about why this is THE perfect balance of weight, size, and cost.
Weight: At 670g it weighs about the same as a half full 1L Nalgene. Enough to respect its heft, not enough to get in the way.
Size: There’s a reason it’s a mug. You bring your mug with you without thinking of it.
Price: You can buy them all day long on eBay for under $350. Pack your lunch for a few weeks and skip going out, you got yourself another one.

But you probably wont need another one. This thing is a TANK. I am able to treat this lens with the same respect I show my own body. While I haven’t ever intentionally tried to harm myself; I’m also not going to hold back on having a good time. This damn lens has been dropped, fallen over on tripods, slammed into rocks while on a harness, rained on, snowed on, froze, thawed, and been drenched more times than I could count. I’ve broken myself more than I’ve done damage to this damn thing. Just leave the lens hood on and maybe a UV filter if you want a bit of extra protection, and just go outside and take some damn photos. Oh yeah and the tripod? Probably wont need either as the Image Stabilizer is pretty good.

Image quality? Good enough that unless I’m pixel peeping I won’t notice its not quite as sharp as my primes. If you’ve gotten this far you see why the image quality doesn’t need to impress me. There are lenses about the same weight & size that have greater focal ranges -see the Tamron 28-300- but at that point you will no longer need to pixel peep to notice the penalty you’re paying in image quality.

In summary, if you are a Canon shooter, I don’t see an excuse not to have one of these glued to a camera at all times. When I’m gone hopefully whoever takes my 24-105 has as good of a time with it as I’ve had with mine.