500mm Reflex

Hi Rich,

after some use of the lens one gets pretty used to avoid those donuts. Remember WYSIWYG so under many circumstances you'd actually see through the viewfinder when and at which amount reflections and/or busy fore and background might be an issue. Sometime a little change of the position a little walking around may reduce a lot the efforts on PP. Only when the subject really justifies all the cloning out, healing and blurring of the donuts I'm going this way. Despite of the shallow DOF being ok for subject isolation from fore and background it's difficult to get satisfying results when fore and background are too busy so the problematic bokeh of this lens influences the appearance. When there are only some few highlights/reflection in the typical donut shape I try to eliminate them sometimes by some cropping or do simply nothing.
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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

Hi Cecco,

the hood from the Sigma has a bayonet mount and its inner diametre is right the outer diametre of the reflex so it slides over the rubber. It's not absolutely firm and normally I'm taking it off when walking around but when shooting it sits reasonable firm. And it twists as the reflex front part twists. Though this has been no problem. The Sigma's hood is deep enough and mounted seems to make part of the reflex. Though I haven't done yet any comparison shots with and without hood under the same circumstances
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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

Hi,

very nice results indeed.

I'd only like to say to all users of the reflex, especially to the beginners, that your results will be much better on many types of subjects when you always get as close as possible "using your feet as a zoom" and thus permitting the usage of a shorter lens. This is in no way meant against the usage of the reflex but as the saying is it's horses for courses. In the same way as a Ferrari may be not the best choice for a move or driving offroad the reflex (and every long tele) may be not the best choice for macro, portraiture and some other stuff. Selecting the right tool for the task is half the way of a successful shot.
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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

Hi,

some BIFs done with the reflex. Perhaps not up to the standards of the top BIF-photographers on this site but not bad either.





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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

Thanks Michael. Unfortunately, the GBH in flight offered me no opportunity to pick the back ground.

The donut bokeh isn't necessarily a feature to be avoided. This photograph exploits it, possibly holding the world record for donut numbers



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Chris Malcolm

Great shot, Chris!

Hi,

this one for sure qualifies for the competition ;-)

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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen

There's a competiton?

With respect to the importance of atmospheric conditions here's one I took on what I hoped was a day of low atmospheric thermal turbulence at a distance of as close as I can tell to 500m as measured on a map with a ruler. It was a slightly hazy late afternoon in which the sun's disc was not quite visible behind light cloud. There was a light breeze. I guess the air temperature was somewhere around 15 degrees Centigrade. If you're curious to check out the terrain on maps etc. the bus was on Edinburgh's North Bridge, and the photograph was taken from beside the National Gallery, looking over Princes Street Gardens and the railway station.

[Sony A350, 500mm, ISO 800, f8, 1/4000th sec. Some noise deliberately left in the image so you can see as much of the detail as possible.]



Nevertheless on close examination you can see that all the straight lines in the bus image are in fact slightly wriggly and smudged here and there. That's typical thermal turbulence distortion. On a warm sunny day over longer distances I've seen it much worse than that, but I junk those photographs. This one I hoped was cool enough and close enough to avoid thermal turbulence. But it wasn't. I had the high shutter speed because I had been trying to take birds in flight and hadn't time to adjust when I spotted the bus image coming up at speed. The interesting thing is that the high shutter speed seems to have frozen the thermal turbulence, allowing its effects to be seen more clearly. Also I was lucky that the thermal distortion didn't throw off the autofocus too much. And of course ISO 800 is well away from best detail resolution on the A350.

Which illustrates that the performance of this lens is good enough that pretty good conditions and pretty good technique are required to get photographs whose detail is limited by the lens rather than the air and the photographer

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Chris Malcolm

Sorry I just was kidding as by the amount of donuts the photo shown by our friend could qualify for a competition.
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Cheers,
Michael Fritzen