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.
|
Blackbird in the shade |
|
Moorhen on island under the road bridge. |
The moorhen was quite a distance away, with pleasing results.
|
Black headed Gull |
Taking flight shots would take some practice, but this isnt bad in an hour.
|
Jackdaw. |
|
Mallard |
I love this drake Mallard. The photo looks better than the duck did!
|
Mallard squabble. |
I would like more attempts at birds doing stuff like this, it makes for an interesting photo I think.
|
A spuggy in the shade |
|
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?
Glad to have been of help Stewart.
ReplyDeleteSome good results there Stewart :-)
ReplyDeleteI 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!
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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...
ReplyDelete