It's the perfect focal length for portraits, and because it's lightweight and has IS you can get away with much slower speeds handheld, something more difficult on the user-heavy 70-200mm/2.8

It is now possible to achieve outstanding results even when conditions aren't perfect (low light/slow shutter speed, absence of a tripod).

When using it for portraits, landscapes, and other non-macro work, IS is great since I don't need a tripod and can use a slower shutter speed

I love the ability to get quality resolution with hand held slow shutter speeds.

A relatively slow shutter speed to capture the scene in front of me usually meant I'd have to compensate by ratcheting up the ISO or go wider with the aperture, which are not always or often good compromises, for image quality reasons as well as for reasons of creative choice.

The only complaint I have is the speed on the

All of my other lens are non IS, so perhaps I'm just used to holding steady and shooting a bit faster shutter speed, but I don't recommend IS, if that's the only difference in the glass

First of all it delivers brilliant up close images smoothly and with amazing speed

The autofocus mechanism is a bit slow since it has such a large range (infinity to 1:1), but the physical switch to adjust the focal range improves the speed quite a bit

Hybrid IS is very useful when shooting portraits or far away subjects so that you can use slow shutter speed such as 1/30 to 1/60 without blur because hand shake

It is now possible to achieve outstanding results even when conditions aren't perfect (low light/slow shutter speed, absence of a tripod).

Though I'm normally a tripod use when shooting the image stabilization allows me to hand-hold at about 2 stops slower speed than normal