The Canon RF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM is one of those lenses that tends to get overlooked once you've moved on to faster glass. If you've been shooting with f/2.8 zooms and primes, it's easy to assume the f/4 version isn't worth reaching for anymore.
Coming to you from Anthony Gugliotta, this candid video follows Gugliotta through the Italian countryside, specifically the border region between Umbria and Tuscany, as he shoots over 2,000 photos almost exclusively on the Canon RF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM. He left his Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8L IS USM at the rental and packed light: a Canon EOS R5 Mark II, the 24-105mm, and a Wandrd Sling that barely fits all of it. The 15-35mm came along mostly out of anxiety, he admits, not because it saw much use. What's interesting here is that Gugliotta didn't plan to rely on the 24-105mm this heavily. It's the first RF lens he ever bought, and he hadn't used it seriously in two or three years before this trip.
The practical argument he makes is straightforward. On a family vacation in well-lit environments, f/4 covers most situations. You're not shooting interiors at midnight. You're walking around medieval towns at 7:30 in the morning with good light, and stopping down to f/5.6 or f/8 actually gives you the depth of field you want for landscapes and architecture. He also carries a variable ND filter that doubles as a circular polarizer, which gives the sky more punch and helps control exposure in brighter conditions. That combination does a lot of the work that a faster aperture would otherwise handle.
Where things get honest is when Gugliotta talks about the lens' real limits. There's a shot he wanted of a hillside church near sunset, the kind that calls for compression at around 200mm, and 105mm just didn't get him there. He also mentions missing his Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM at certain moments when reach would have made a difference. The tradeoff is weight and bulk: a 70-200mm is roughly twice the size and weight of the 24-105mm, which changes the entire character of a trip like this. He's also filming the video on a Canon PowerShot V1, which he uses for vlogging and b-roll while the R5 Mark II handles stills. He's got thoughts on the PowerShot V1 as a vlogging camera, including one specific frustration about ND filters, that come up in the video worth hearing if you're considering it.
Check out the video above for the full rundown from Gugliotta, including the actual photos from Florence, the Gladiator wheat field location in Tuscany, and his take on whether the 24-105mm could work as a single travel lens for an upcoming Iceland hiking trip.
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