One of those posts regarded\u00a0the yet-to-be-available and much-to-be-desired Canon 200-400; that lens is now available.<\/p>\n This week, I have had two different needs for a long lens.<\/p>\n Photographing wildlife<\/strong>.\u00a0 I will be at a game ranch next week.\u00a0 I must choose and rent some long telephoto glass.\u00a0 (If this need arose more frequently, I would purchase\/own it.)\u00a0 What lens choices available to me?<\/p>\n First, note that there is generally a trade-off between any fixed-focal-length lenses (non zoom) that have wide aperture (gathers more light) and zoom lenses, which provide variable focal length but sacrifice a bit with regard to aperture.\u00a0 I would love to have multiple long lenses at my disposal; but if I must choose one, then the flexibility of a zoom is the safe choice.<\/p>\n Zoom options.\u00a0 Top of the list is that new 200-400.\u00a0 Hands down, that is the lens I want to shoot with.\u00a0 The problem is the price tag; the rental fee is over $600 and purchase price is more than $10,000.\u00a0 This leaves me with a choice of the Canon 100-400 f\/4.5-5.6L, Canon 100-300 f\/4.5-5.6L, that same 100-300 plus a 1.4x teleconverter, or possibly a third party lens such as Sigma.<\/p>\n Multiple reviews across the internet all agree that the 100-300 is a superior lens compared to the 100-400.\u00a0 Unless you need the extra reach of 400mm.\u00a0 Apparently the 100-300 is not compatible with Canon teleconverters.\u00a0 So I chose the 100-400.<\/p>\n Photographing an ocean event from the shore<\/strong>.\u00a0 The event this week was the Greasy Pole challenge at the St. Peter\u2019s Festival in Gloucester.\u00a0 For this event, I opted to test something new with a small camera, specifically, my micro four-thirds (MFT) camera, a Panasonic Lumix G3.<\/p>\n All micro four-thirds cameras use an image sensor that is the same size and is half the size of the sensor in my DSLR.\u00a0 A 200mm lens on the smaller camera is like putting a 200mm lens on the larger camera and then cropping the image to \u00bd size.\u00a0 It is called \u201ccrop factor\u201d, but it implies that the smaller sensor size makes a 200mm lens seem like 400mm.\u00a0 Image quality of my MFT camera is very good, but significant image noise is present at ISO 800 (because the image sensor jams pixels into a much tighter space).<\/p>\n My zoom lens for MFT goes up to 200mm. For whatever reason, neither Olympus nor Panasonic offer a real teleconverter for MFT.\u00a0 So I tried a 1.7x teleconverter that threads on to the front of the lens.\u00a0 If we ignore the fact that the sensor is small, the result is akin to 1300mm.\u00a0 Or considering the small sensor size, it is like shooting a full-frame camera with a 680mm lens and then crop the image to one half size (you get fewer pixels, but it looks like zoom).<\/p>\n [Click on any of the included images to see a larger view.]<\/p>\n The sample images shown abive are (1) without the teleconverter and (2) with the teleconverter.\u00a0 The teleconverter is worse than I had hoped; it causes very significant loss of sharpness and contrast.\u00a0 Is this acceptable?\u00a0\u00a0 No, not for me.\u00a0 But the teleconverter was a remnant piece of equipment (from a deceased video camcorder) that was collecting dust at home and cost me nothing to try it.<\/p>\n The last image shown here is shot without the teleconverter and then cropped to achieve the same perspective as though I had used the teleconverter.\u00a0 The result has far fewer pixels than originally captured by the camera.\u00a0 Using computer software, I then artificially increased the size of the image, to arrive at a 10-megapixel image with far better image quality than when shot with the teleconverter.<\/p>\n So, for situations like this one, where auto-focus is not particularly important, I come to the same conclusion as before.\u00a0 An old\/used telephoto lens for any SLR, with an adapter to fit it onto a four-thirds or micro four-thirds camera.<\/p>\n And my best MFT solution that includes auto-focus, would be the Panasonic 100-300\/4-5.6 Lumix G Vario (cost roughly $600).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For most of us, the need for an ultra-long lens is infrequent \u2026 but when you need it, you need it! I\u2019ve written about this before \u2026\u00a0Ultimate Lens for Sports & Wildlife\u00a0… and … Novoflex SuperTelephoto. One of those posts regarded\u00a0the yet-to-be-available and much-to-be-desired Canon 200-400; that lens is now available. This week, I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,71,20],"tags":[53,81,84,82,83],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-equipment","category-lens","category-photo","tag-camera-equipment-lens","tag-inexpensive","tag-lens-2","tag-ultra","tag-zoom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"MFT](\"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/GLOU-1070384-300x200.jpg\" "\\"lens")
<\/a>![\"MFT](\"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/GLOU-1070385-300x200.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Without](\"https:\/\/www.kevindavisphoto.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/GLOU-1070384-3-300x200.jpg\")
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