It'd dead, the lens

I've been using my Canon EF-S IS 17-85mm lens for - well, quite many years now (since 2008 possibly). Despite the weight it became my primary lens for general use due to large zoom area and image stabilization.

Just last summer I had to do some work on it (fixing stuck lens), and now it's completely dead. I previously mentioned that we just took two-week holiday, and of course it started to fail just halfway through that visit. First it randomly started giving error 001 (communication failure) after taking picture, and fairly quickly after that it stopped responding to camera completely. With a week of holiday still to go. F*ck.

We still had old pocket cam (Canon Digital Ixus series) so it wasn't complete loss (I still consider phone cameras as absolutely last resort option only, right after canvas, palette and brushes). However I'm so used to tweaking just about every lighting parameter of camera to get shot just right in more difficult situations (I'm using Av mode about 95% of time, remaining 5% being mostly full manual with occasional other modes thrown in here and there) so lack of any useful adjustments in those point-and-shoots is frustrating, to put it mildly. But at least I got the usual holiday snapshots.

Back home I took the lens apart again, but there wasn't anything obviously wrong so I gave up. The build of the thing is quite interesting though so I'm considering doing a better teardown of it later. The build of these things is absolutely fascinating, from systems design point of view.

But anyway, I had also used my old Canon 450D body just about the same time as the lens, so it was time to upgrade that too, to nice Canon 700D and brand new EF-S 18-135 IS STM (that's for APS-C sized cell, Image Stabilizer and Stepper (focusing) Motor, for those less familiar Canon terminology). Let's hope those serve me as well and as long as the old lens and camera.

And no, I didn't throw the 450D body away - it is still perfectly functional so it is my backup camera now.