I ended up selling-off my SP500mm f8 a while back, as I had the Canon also. The only thing I miss is the "macro" mode of the Tamron, but an extension tube or two gets me in the zone when I need to.
One to keep this thread active...I've never posted an AF lens in Alt Gear, but this is from the EF500mm f4 IS. Shot is of the pre-race practice for the America's Cup, in Newport, RI. I was over a half mile away, high up on rock cliffs (+110 feet to the water).
Bif: This is the location where I took the photo of the Beike & Jobu gimbals for your other thread...
I keep looking for this lens on the cheap but never seem to run into one. :-/
Not really "whow" for me :-)
The lens has problems with CA / Purple fringing. There are for examples images with sunshine and naked tree branches - most of the image is fringing total crap there.
I have made some optimisation, and I think it is better now. I still make to many unsharp focussed images, have to learn better focussing with it. and need to repair the iris.
I suppose the "L" version is better. At least I got my lens for less than 1 Euro per mm focal length :-)
In my image gallery you could look at optimized full resolution images made with this lens and others. Click on the bottom of the image in the center.
Yeah, I dunno if it's just me (and maybe you) but that's something I noticed going between 300mm and 500mm. The manual focusing becomes logarithmically more difficult with the increased FL.
This is one reason I decided to look into different heads. Certainly the gimbal heads do make a huge difference but it's still nothing like 200 or 300mm. I can imagine 800mm would be pretty gnarly! Maybe a cheap follow-focus rig would help?
I think it could be a problem that I work with the EE-S screen wich is optimized for fast lenses. Have to make further tests.
And I have to learn, that with 800mm focal length, infinity is far away.
On this image made with the FD 800/5.6 SSC and EOS 5D
Edited - Tree has to be sharp, because behind and infront the tree objects are sharp - but looks not 100% for me. High-Res image here.
At the moment I work from a Monostat monopod, and a small Manfrotto 234 tilt head.
Yeah, that's pretty soft. But I think most of that is the lens's CA and apparent softness at that aperture. If you look at the bottom rung of that fence there seems to be a 6-pixel CA contrast killing halo. On top of which there seems to be quite a lot of sensor noise - even though it's only ISO 800. The focus looks fine to me tho and I don't see any obvious camera shake.
On the mono-pod I guess everyone is different but for me monopods don't really do much for stabilizing long lenses over about 500mm equiv. They're awesome for taking all the load off my arms tho and enable me to to use long heavy lenses for extended periods without fatigue. I find I still need really high shutter speeds tho - with anything over about 600mm equiv. Maybe they can stabilize by a stop or two at most - but even so only above 1/500s or so (with FLs of 600mm equiv. and over).
