Extremely Sharp -- TC Use knocks off a star

William Woodruff wrote:

Karl_Guttag wrote:

TimP111 wrote:

tbh you can argue if you are mounting the TC for what your doing then you are probably looking for more reach anyway and the fact you cant zoom back all the way isnt really a disadvantage

TBH, many subjects are dynamic in their distance from the camera. Let's say when shooing outdoor sports or, in my case, airplanes. In these cases, the lack of zoom range is a serious handicap.

The pictures below are from a test run I made of a small airshow before a major airshow.

The first picture below is at 700mm. Note this is with a very large plane with a wingspan more than 2x that of a small fighter plane.

700mm at the start of the takeoff run

Now, as the plane passed by zoomed all the way out to 420mm

As the plane passes by at 420mm

Then you have mixes of planes flying in various directions and distances and formations of multiple airplanes. It turns out that 140 to 700 would have been a nearly ideal zoom range most of the time. At 700mm, I could isolate a single plane or better capture planes further away. Based on these and other tests, I gave up on using the TC. Using the TC meant giving up too many shots as the plane(s) approached.

So you just crop, right? Well, below is a smaller plane at 700mm. I would already be cropping the 700mm shot. There would not be much left at 500mm.

Smaller plane landing at 700mm

Because of the time and risk of damage, it is impractical to change out the TC.

At the big airshow, I ended up using the RF100-500 on the R5 and my RF24-240 on my RP backup camera to catch planes that were taxiing close by where I needed less than 100mm, sometimes a lot less. The 1.4X TC stayed in my bag after trying it for a few shots.

Have you tried one of the 150-600's, adapted? That is almost exactly the range you are looking for.

I have the RF100-500 and am not looking to try out other lenses. The RF100-500 is very sharp and couples well with the R5. I would expect that a 3rd party lens via an extender would not gain me anything with the difference between 500mm and 600mm.

For myself, I love my EF 100-400 II for airshows. If I am right up on the flight line, the lens is just about perfect as-is. It also takes the 1.4 converter really well, with great image quality, if needed. I haven't tried the 2.0 converter; I will probably get one, but I seldom run out of reach with the 1.4.

I have tested the image quality with the combo, and even pixel peeping, there is next to no image quality loss with and without the TC. A consolation is that the 100-500 has 1.25x more range than a 100-400. Likely the focus will be faster/better without the TC. I will still find uses for the TC, but not in the use that I had hoped.

The other possibility, is one that I am about to try: That is adapting an M6II, and putting the 100-400 on it, with the 1.4 converter where reach is important. I suspect that running the 100-400 on the M6II, might be a sharper combination that going to the 2.0 converter, but we'll see.

With the airshows, as you know, the subject distance and subject size change dramatically from moment to moment, so zoom range becomes important.