I met up with Alan Gilbertson this morning at Warkworth for a field trial of his Canon 400mm f5.6 lens on my camera. Not only was he kind enough to give me a try out, he also showed me a thing or two about settings on the camera that I didn't have a clue about. Cheers Alan, I may be back in touch soon!
The lens is quite a chunky thing with a well made feel about it. In today's sunshine, it seemed fine, hand held despite what people say about its lack of image stabilising, though what it would be like on a dull day remains to be seen. The Blackbird pic below was taken with only a shutter speed of 1/100 and it seems good enough to me.
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| Blackbird in the shade |
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| Moorhen on island under the road bridge. |
The moorhen was quite a distance away, with pleasing results.
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| Black headed Gull |
Taking flight shots would take some practice, but this isnt bad in an hour.
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| Jackdaw. |
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| Mallard |
I love this drake Mallard. The photo looks better than the duck did!
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| Mallard squabble. |
I would like more attempts at birds doing stuff like this, it makes for an interesting photo I think.
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| A spuggy in the shade |
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| Song Thrush |
The closest focusing of 3.5 mtrs might seem a long way but in the field, close birds didn't fit in the viewfinder, hence my head shots, so it wasn't really a problem.
Now to get my mate Gary to let me road test the Canon 300mm with 1.4x extender....I wonder how it will compare in the hands of a beginner?
5 comments:
Glad to have been of help Stewart.
Some good results there Stewart :-)
I wouldn't really bother with extenders, they degrade the image far too much ( In my opinion!)
when you get really serious, you can have a bash with the 500f4 + 1.4 extender!
I think different lenses and extenders are all down to personal preference, horses for courses and all that, you just need to be comfortable and happy with what you use.
I use a canon 1.4x extender. It is permanently attached to my 300 F4 L series lens and I don't feel there is any great loss of quality tbh.
If you look very closely at 2 images one taken with the extender and one without then you may spot very slight differences, I tried this when I was buying my setup but the differences were so minor that it didn’t concern me.
All of my bird photographs are taken with the 1.4x extender fitted and there’s a few that I’ve been pleased with since I started using a ‘proper’ camera. Most of the serious bird photographers I know seem to have extenders strapped to their big bazookas too and they often produce nice images.
I guess if you are considering an extender you need to get the correct canon extender to fit the L series lens, I imagine others may result in lower quality images ?
I cant tell you all how grateful I am to be able to get good advice and to be able to try before buy! Thanks to Alan and Gary again...
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