Years ago when I traded in my medium format Bronica SQA kit for a D100, my entry into both digital and autofocus, I got 3 A/F lenses to go with it. 18-35, 28-105, and 80-200. During the years before WPF the 80-200 was hardly ever used, most of my pics being in the range 18 to 50mm. With the advent of WPF and a lot more photography generally, I realised 18mm was not wide enough and traded that for a 12-24 and that has become my favoured out and about lens. The 28-105 still gets a bit of use, and until the 'Shooting the Moon' thread the 80-200 was hardly used. I took it to Titchwell a couple of times but that was really a waste of time as any birds were just dots in the frame. If we were treking any distance I would take the 200 f4 AIS as it weighes a fraction of the zoom and is a lot smaller.
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to swap the 80-200 for an old manual focus 400mm IFED f5.6 lens. There were two thoughts behind going for the swap. I would have a prime for those moon pics, and I would be able to use it wide open for those background blasting shots that are the regular fare of Rob and others. Well it turned into a cloud magnate, so apart from a Starling shot I posted, and a couple of moon shots I have not really had an opportunity to give it a whirl.
At this point regular users of long lenses may be thinking so what, and perhaps 400mm is not that long for bird photography, but a move from 12-24 to 400mm is quite a leap for general photography.
The design of the lens goes back to the 1980's so the minimum focussing distance is 15ft, and at that distance dof wide open at f5.6 is a mere 1 3/4" going up to a massive 3 inches at f8. You have to get to 40ft at f5.6 for that dof to become 12". Infinity dof at f5.6 is quite amusing for a wide angle user, 2820ft or 940yds - infinity.
Well the cloud curse was finally lifted on Friday. A quick check on the satellite cloud imagary confirmed a good day, so we decided on a trip that would allow a play. Wells Next The Sea on the North Norfolk coast.
Wells was a real eye opener. With the tide out there was no need to trudge through the mud to get onto a sandbank for a picture of the yacht stranded on that sandbank. In fact I had to move back to about 1/2 a mile away to enable me to get the yacht and mast in frame. I tried a shot of an anchor by the harbour masters office to make use of the shallow dof and could get no further back due to a wall, so it is a tight composition, and this is from about 40ft away. I tried a few shots of ducks on the quay side which is also used as a car park. Again moving back far enough to get them in frame was a new experience, with Stevie having to watch my back to prevent me becoming a traffic casualty.
So I now have a whole new learning curve on subject and composition with this lens, and the crazy thing is that my wide is A/F where massive dof could easily cover focussing error, and the 400 is manual focus with non existant dof. Lots of practice needed.
Any long lens users out there that have bought into a real wide angle and are suffering from viewfinder agoraphobia.
The attached pics are all full frame. Yacht and ducks at f8, and the anchor at f5.6, an experiment in blowing the background, but f8 may have been a better option at this subject distance.
Don