RF800 and crop sensor cameras

John Sheehy wrote:

9VIII wrote:

John Sheehy wrote:

Emile15 wrote:

I sympathise. I am a little thrilled by the R7 because I am thinking of using my RF800 on it and am even wondering what it will be like with the 1.4 or 2.0 extenders! Imagine: 800x1.6x1.4=1792 or 800x1.6x2=2560 (@F22). Wow!

"Wow!" or "Whoahhh, I can't find the subject"? Something that people often don't consider when pursuing so-called "reach" is that a narrow angle of view can be difficult to work with, and is best reserved for very sedentary subjects.

This difficulty is not gradual in my experience, as you narrow the angle of view; it gets difficult rapidly somewhere around 800mm FFEQ.

"Both Eyes Open"

That doesn't work for me; one eye dominates and the brain blanks out the other, and the physically longer and bigger the lens, the more it messes with the bare eye's view. What you see in a very narrow angle of view through a pupil much larger than the ones in our eyes does not resemble a small section of our eye's field, because of the extremely shallow DOF. I don't know how many times I switched back and forth from looking through a very narrow angle of view and the direct scene, multiple times, and still couldn't find the subject in the lens.

The RF800/11 is a great lens when it is the right lens for the job; every person serious about focal length-limited photography will probably find good use for it, unless they are willing to tote around a 500/4 or 600/4 with a 1.4x, an 800/5.6, a 400/4 or 400/2.8 with a 2x, but there are so many possible ways in which the lens can prevent you from getting a shot at all in certain situations. I missed a long-desired photo-op a few days ago because I switched from the RF100-400 to the RF800/11, because I was in a place where I expected birds to be far away, and within a minute of switching and zipping up my backpack, I heard a "bzzzzz bzzzzz bzzzzz" sound very close, while I was photographing a relatively distant warbler, and I looked down, and on a rock, a foot off the ground and about 5 feet from me, was a recently-fledged Blue-winged Warbler, looking toward me and shaking its wings as it buzzed. By the time I decided that backing up wasn't an option, and started to switch the lenses again, it flew up into a tree where it may have been more than 6 meters away, but by the time I relocated it in the tree, a parent called it and they flew off into the distance. Nice "close encounter of the bird kind", but no photos. Had this happened 2 minutes earlier, I would have had a shot of this fledgling that almost filled the frame at 400mm on the RF100-400.

I have had trouble tracking with the 2x converter on my EF600ii on FF, which only got worse with the R7 crop sensor with the 1.4x @ 840mm, so similar to the RF800mm. A videographer shooting through an EF500ii with a 2x showed me his Olympus dot sight yesterday, and I ordered one from Amazon as soon as I got home. The dot sight goes in the hot shoe and lets you center the image while looking at the scene with both eyes open.