If you haven’t already noticed, most of this site is a review of this particular lens. It rarely leaves my camera, and for good reason, but as anyone who has spent any time with lenses knows, nothing comes without sacrifices. I’ll start with the cons so as to not waste your time if any of them are deal breakers for you.

Cons:

• This is a prime lens, as in not a zoom lens, as in no zooming.
• Tunnel vision. a 25° angle of view means that it pretty much sucks for landscape photography, and to take a big group portrait you have to stand back pretty far.
• It is optimized for 1.6x cameras like the 20D-50D and the Digital Rebel series, which is a plus if that is what you have, but it wouldn’t function right on a full frame camera like the 5D MarkII

Hmm, well, I’m out of cons already. On to the Pros:

• The lens doesn’t change length when you focus. No bumping that bug off the leaf as your lens pokes out, and it lessens the risk grit and dis-alignment.
• The focusing wheel is big enough that you don’t have to hunt for it, and is built really well. It is coarse enough to not send you into mad spinning when something moves, but fine enough to get fine focus with no rattling.
• Color representation and bokeh are both very nice, and you have plenty of options for depth of field.
• It works well in a variety of lighting conditions.
• I’ve found it to be awesome as a portrait lens as well as for small macro work.
• Not too big, not too heavy.

You can practically fill the frame with a fly. Going from regular vision to looking through some lenses can be disorienting with all the change in magnification, but this 60mm lens is similar enough to my regular vision that I can take pictures with both eyes open with no disorientation, which I find handy for keeping an eye on what’s outside the frame.

Amazon carries this Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM Digital SLR Lens
at a fair price, which is great, because who doesn’t already have an amazon account?