A couple walking down a cobbled city street after dark, sharp from the cap on his head to the stitching on her coat, with a crowd of thirty other people and a moving tram dissolved into soft colour behind them. Nothing in the background is legible. That is the point. The separation was not made in software, and it was not made by cranking the ISO. The standard advice for night street work is to buy the body with the cleanest high ISO and shoot a modest zoom at f/4.

Lyon, 15 July 2018, early evening, a few hours after France won the World Cup final. The frame was taken from inside a carriage rolling into the station, through a window covered in water. Two women with tricolour paint on their cheeks and a flag rolled under an arm, a man in a cap on his phone, white bevelled tile, a notice about the Eurexpo access closure running to 31 August.

Canon lenses don’t all focus the same way, and once you start noticing it, it’s hard to unsee. The difference isn’t just speed—it’s character. Some lenses snap into focus with authority, others glide, others feel almost damped, like there’s intention behind every millimeter of movement. Behind the acronyms on the barrel sit seven distinct motor technologies, each engineered around a different idea of what “good autofocus” actually means. Ring-Type USM is where Canon built its reputation.

Autofocus has changed so much in the last decade that older ways of judging lens performance can feel oddly outdated. It used to be enough for a lens to acquire focus reasonably fast and land accurately most of the time. Today the demands are far higher. Modern cameras track eyes in motion, detect animals and vehicles, and fire long bursts while constantly recalculating focus between frames. In video, they perform smooth continuous transitions while the microphone sits only inches away, ready to expose every mechanical click and scrape.