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600mm f/11 or 800mm f/11 - which one would you buy?

Started Jun 21, 2020 | Polls thread
John Sheehy Forum Pro • Posts: 26,698
Re: 600mm f/11 or 800mm f/11 - which one would you buy?

SkySpades wrote:

Colin46 wrote:

Neither, too slow and lack of background separation at f11 renders these two useless for me.

just because modern cameras can go to high ISO’s doesn’t mean you want to.

Big lack of background separation in this thread full of f/11 images.

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1649828/7

One should never think of background blur in terms of f-ratios, except when all you're varying is the f-ratio and maintain every single other thing the same.

The background blur comes from subject distance, background distance, and the size of your entrance pupil. Cropping 4x from a 200/2.8 lens gives the same background blur as 800/11.

People tend to read too much into f-ratios and lose sight of apertures.

The main downfall of an 800/11, compared to shorter lenses with cropping or crop factors, is that you can't zoom out, or remove a 2x TC and drop to 400/5.6.

Another way to look at this is that 800/11 on FF is like 500/7.1 on a 1.6x crop sensor, only 1/3 stop slower at 500mm than many 3rd-party zooms, but probably sharper and AF-ing faster.

Of course, when some people see these slow long lenses announced, they will fear that this means that faster ones are less likely to come any time soon, which may or may not be true.

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