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Telephoto lenses for shooting tits : 10 lenses compared
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:11 am    Post subject: Telephoto lenses for shooting tits : 10 lenses compared Reply with quote

About 10 paper rolls tested with a dummy bird :


Ultra Achromatic Takumar rocks everything, even with its cracked front lens, confirming the "field" feeling I had of it
300/4 V2 and V3 manage well at corners
500/4.5 bleeds red, a bit disapointed
400/4 confirms my feeling about being a very good lens
Donuts factory is quite good at center but does nots seems to be good outside


PostPosted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 3:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Reading the topic title, I had hoped for something else... disappointed!


PostPosted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 5:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bird photography is bird photography. lol

Thanks for test! Those Takumars look great! Is that 4.5/500 the S-M-C?


PostPosted: Sun Nov 29, 2020 5:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I got fooled too many times and did want to take revenge Twisted Evil

Yes taht is the S-M-C. I am not sure about this result, I did not see something like this previously.


PostPosted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 12:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Occasionaly doing my own tests, I'm well aware of the difficulties relates to such a task. Tele lenses are especially prone to problems - be it slight movments of the camera/lens setup (mirror ans/or shutter), air turbulences, haze in the air, and defining the focus point (longitudinal CAs).

I'm not familiar with Canons DSLRs (apart from a EOS 1D MkII here), and therefore I don't know why you got these "???" images. Whenever I do tests, however, I immediately do control each image, therefore preventing such "???" images !

Before you do any future work, it might be worth to find out what went wrong with theses "???" images, e. g. by shooting a series of identical images and trying to find out what provokes these unsharp images.

Apart from that - if you have quite a few completely unsharp images where one would expect good performance, of course I ask myself if some of the other images simply are slightly unsharp. That compromises the validity of the entire test.

I know very well how much work it is to compare that many lenses, especially tele lenses. Nevertheless I would suggest that you

1) find out waht has caused theses obviously unsharp images
2) re-run the entire telephoto test

Stephan


PS I know than my venerable Sony A900 even when using mirror lock up (2 s) and a solid tripod can produce obvious blurring with tele lenses >200mm. Using the in-body stabilizer reduces these difficulties, but doesn't avoid them completely. However, that works only with chipped lenses. Therefore, for all my lens testing I'm using the A7II / A7RII, either with electronic first shutter, or with completely electronic shutter.


PostPosted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 9:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The 6D is a 20 Mpix full frame body with liveview (used at x10 to do the focus). 20 Mpix is very demanding so that's why I do not expect a super sharpness at 100% and on some tests I only used 50% crops.
At f/8 I was at 1/100s so on tripod with wireless trigger this should be OK.
I know that I should redo all but... this already took me hours to do this (getting all the gear outside the house, setting the bird in place, shooting, sorting all the gear in the lab, taking all the screens to publish the comparison...) and this comparison, despite being "uncomplete", already brings me what Ineeded : enough datas to see what lenses I want to keep and what lenses I will sell. For the lenses I will keep for use, I will do more precise tests with more aperture settings Wink


PostPosted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 9:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CarbonR wrote:
The 6D is a 20 Mpix full frame body with liveview (used at x10 to do the focus). 20 Mpix is very demanding so that's why I do not expect a super sharpness at 100% and on some tests I only used 50% crops.
At f/8 I was at 1/100s so on tripod with wireless trigger this should be OK.

I'm not os sure. My experience - although with Sony A900 and not with Canon gear - the SLRs are quite tricky, especially if no in-body stabilization is available. Even the mechanical shutter of the A7 series can cause considerable pain when testing long focal lengths. Therefore all my testing with such lenses is done with the electronical shutter.

Sometimes also the ground on which the tripod stands can be mving slightly if you move. Grass/earth and even concrete paving slabs may move slightly if you yourself move around the tripod - and induce some oscillations.

Certainly worth trying to find the problem, and tell us what it was!

I remember well testing the Minolta AF 200mm lenses for Sony (2008) - I had lots of problems getting really reproducible results. Finally it was not one, but a whole bunch of small things together causing the troubles! Among them were air turbulences, back-/frontfocus (remember those ...? pre live-view times!!), some reversible de-centering of zoom groups (depending on how i did turn the zoom ring!), and 2-3 more things I don't recall at the moment. Shutter vibrations were ceratinly a factor, too - in spite of using MLU.


CarbonR wrote:

I know that I should redo all but... this already took me hours to do this (getting all the gear outside the house, setting the bird in place, shooting, sorting all the gear in the lab, taking all the screens to publish the comparison...)

Oh yes, I know very well ... and getting precise and reproducible results is even more worrysome.
To be very clear: I tried many times to get reproducible results with ten 400mm ... 600mm lenses. I never managed ... and I never published a test comparing 400mm lenses. Usually weather (wind / air turbulences) was the biggest problem.

S


PostPosted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 10:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

stevemark wrote:

PS I know than my venerable Sony A900 even when using mirror lock up (2 s) and a solid tripod can produce obvious blurring with tele lenses >200mm. Using the in-body stabilizer reduces these difficulties, but doesn't avoid them completely. However, that works only with chipped lenses. Therefore, for all my lens testing I'm using the A7II / A7RII, either with electronic first shutter, or with completely electronic shutter.


Yes, EFCS (Electronic First Curtain Shutter) or a total electronic shutter are very effective in reducing vibration for speeds in the range of 1/4 to 1/30 sec.

In fact, IBIS (In-Body Image Stabilization) works well with chipped lenses, but it is very important that the chip be programmed for the same focal length of the lens. Sadly, most chipped adapters are programmed for 50mm focal length only, so the IBIS is completely useless for focal length of, say, 135mm or more. For example, with a 200 mm lens, IBIS will compensate for only 25% of the vibration, so the blur in the final image would still be 75% of the blur without any image stabilization. Likewise, a 50mm chipped adapter will introduce huge overcompensation for a 20mm lens, so it would be better to turn off image stabilization for wideangle lenses.