There is a lot of talk on the internet about the bokeh produced from the 500PF versus an f/4 prime. I also did controlled test for this by defocusing a messy tree/leaf image at different degrees of defocus. I shot both lenses (FL and PF) at f/5.6. So this was to test any inherent issue produced by the PF element and not for f/4 vs f/5.6.
In my testing, I could not find any detrimental bokeh from the PF element at equal apertures. Therefore, I challenge anyone who claims the PF element is an issue with bokeh to post comparison images between the two to prove it.
Nervous bokeh comes from a combination of VR use (sometimes) and a certain distance from focal plane to the "messy" background. Heat waves and other "bad air" can make it much worse.
Good backgrounds and lack of nervous bokeh comes from choosing your backgrounds properly. If you can't control your background then you have a choice to make if the image is worth taking or not. Of the three images examples I linked to I surely would have still taken the lion and heron shot, the bokeh is off but the shot is still great. The first one could go either way for me, that bokeh is more shot ruining to me.
One stop will help a little bit but most times with a messy background it won't do enough to matter.
arbitrage wrote:
Nervous bokeh comes from a combination of VR use (sometimes) and a certain distance from focal plane to the "messy" background. Heat waves and other "bad air" can make it much worse.
My experience exactly Geoff.
And if you can't always control the B/G or keep ISO down as much as you'd like, judicial use of the gaussian blur tool can be very handy for eliminating high ISO colour noise and for smoothing out "nervous bokeh" on backgrounds.
Just got the lens yesterday after an eight month wait. Test in the back yard as a quasi macro lens. Hoping for good things in the weeks to come. Air show in a few weeks, should do well there.
I've parted ways with my Canon 1DX2, and as such the D500 + 500PF are now my primary birding rig. It was definitely a tough decision, but in the end the diminuitive size/weight, outstanding IQ and solid AF all just made sense. While there are fringe cases where the 1DX2+600+1.4 is the better choice, most of the time the D500PF will be able to get the shot; I think I'm ok with making that trade-off for the smaller, lighter package.
I'm still keeping the 600mm around, as I do have the EOS R to use it on if there's just no other option. I'm also curious to see what Canon offers in their next gen releases.
