Tag Archives: telephoto

New lens

Posted on by

2

The new lens showed up Thursday and I had it out Friday, first at the bark park where I take the dogs to play and then at a park in Carmel, a little north of Indianapolis.  This is a Sigma 120 – 400 mm f/4.5-5.6 lens with optical stabilization, which means the lens can compensate to an extent for shaky hands.

The tree tops were about 80 yards away and the lens was out at 400 mm, hand held.  The lens performed beyond my expectations, I thought there would be significant blurring but there wasn’t.  This lens is going to be a lot of fun.

Here’s the moon, again with the camera and lens hand held.  I’ve never used a lens this long.  The lenses I was used to left a lot to the imagination when photographing the moon, the images were so small.

I’ve wanted to get an image of a goose in flight; our church has adopted the Celtic view of the Holy Spirit as something wild and unpredictable, a wild goose.  The first problem was finding the goose in the sky.  It’s one thing to spot it with two eyes and something else to look for it through a long lens.  Next time I’ll open the aperture up a couple of stops to get the color of the goose rather than just a silhouette.

The park in Carmel was very nice, well worth going back to.  Now if I could just remember how to get there.

It was cold enough that there was some ice on the water but it wasn’t so cold that it was uncomfortable, probably somewhere in the upper 20’s.  This was when I learned that as much as I like the performance of this lens, it sucks up a good bit of power, especially in cold weather when batteries are especially prone to fail.  A second battery was all that was needed.  I have four altogether and they will all be charged and ready to go any time I go out in cold weather with this lens.

I’ve never had a shot this good of ducks.

Again, the lens performed very well.

It’s interesting to go out with a new lens that extends capability the way this 400 mm lens did for me.  After a few shots, I start to see the world with this lens in mind and the image possibilities start to multiply.  I never would have thought of making most of the images here before I got this lens.  The world has become a bigger place.

Now, if I can just find that robin that started this whole business of a long lens.

I need a new lens

Posted on by

4

Golf was one of my dad’s favorite occupations for a good bit of his life.  He and my mother had a house that backed onto a golf course and Pop spent a lot of time out there.  Every once in a while, accompanied I’m going to guess, by a slump in performance, he would say he needed new clubs.  Just to see what he would say, we would ask why he needed new ones, since he had a perfectly good set of clubs already.  He always had an answer to that, and what it lacked in logic,  it more than made up for in conviction.  He got new clubs and he was happy.

I’ve gone for several years with a 17 – 85 mm zoom as the main lens for my Canon digital cameras, first a 20D and now a 40D.  This has worked just fine, even in situations where others might have wanted a longer telephoto lens.  The reason it worked, is that it produced a result that I liked, a rather painterly effect rather than a tack sharp image. 

The image of this reddish egret, shot on Sanibel Island in Florida, accounted for about 10% of the raw image file in size.  Blown up to 15 inches or so, I find it appealing but definitely not sharp.

The same is true for these birds photographed at Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana.  Seen printed on matte paper, it is hard to tell if they were painted or photographed.

I was out yesterday and saw some robins about 40 feet away (I’m guessing here) bathing in a stream.  I wanted to get them creating circles of ripples as they cleaned themselves and I wanted it sharp.  Naturally they left as I was setting up the camera and tripod.  I was patient though, and they came back. 

I got in a few shots before they left altogether.  Yes, I did get pretty much what I wanted although it would have been better to get the reflection of the head inside the inner ring.  The image is fairly sharp but the problem is it is small.  Cropped out of an image 3888 by 2592 pixels, this image was 619 by 362 pixels, or a little over 2% of the total area of the original.   In other words, pretty small.  This lens is not doing the job.  I need a larger one.

Pop, if you can hear me wherever you are, would you give me a few pointers on making the case for this new lens?