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Old 05-01-06, 01:49
jseaman jseaman is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: North Carolina - USA
Age: 69
Posts: 43
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A rule of thumb that I'm sure you have heard is that, for hand holding, shutter speed should be 1 over focal length - a 300mm lens should be a minimum speed of 1/300 second.

This is complicated by 2 things in your case. the 20D's crop factor of 1.6 and the use of a teleconverter ... so:

with the 1.4x teleconverter minimum shutter speed for hand holding: 1/672 second
with the 2x: 1/960

With your 400mm lens these speeds become: 1/896 and 1/1280.

Don't think for a moment that these speeds are on the high side. Remember, you are talking about what has become a 1000mm lens! That's 20x (would you even consider hand holding your scope?)

And as Andy mentioned, stopping down a bit is a good idea. Doing so, it becomes very difficult to obtain these speeds! You will also likely be using manual focus. With all these factors it becomes just about a requirement to use a tripod - and a remote release and mirror lockup is a good idea too.

This is the level where digiscoping takes over from SLR's.
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