A lens which would be very hard to carry, and nearly impossible to shoot with. Not to mention shooting *hand-held". Which is just what I did here! (Above 300mm was considered impossible by most.)
And I did it in dark weather, pretty close to sunset. And basically ALL the pictures were sharp. One image of these two is a crop of "100%" of the other one, meaning all you can get out of a picture. The is the longest lens I've had, in performance speaking (tele-reach).
...In physical size, somewhere I have an old manual-focus bird-photographer's 500mm lens. This lens was not sharp, it did not zoom, focusing with it was hit-and-miss at best, and it was so big you were likely to be taken down be the police by your third photo. (No joke, I'd hate to walk around in people'd areas with that thing. (In contrast this lens is half the size/weight.))
Auto-focus and auto-stabilisation has a *lot* of the honor of the performance of these lenses. High-sensitivity digitial sensors a lot of the rest. My raw talent has... well, not a lot. :-)
[For those who wonder about the un-sharpness of parts of the picture (forground/background), this depends on the settting of the lens' "aperture" and can be used creatively. It's a natural optical phenomenon.]
I'm using this lens on a Panasonic Lumix GX8. It may be the best lens I own - as it should be, it's also by far the most expensive! Most shots are brilliantly sharp. I do find that a few shots are slightly soft, but I'm wondering if that's down to my focusing technique.
ReplyDeleteI guess they could be slightly out of focus. Or it's just outside what your hand-holding range, combined with that of the the camera's. Can handle.
ReplyDeleteIt seems unlikely to me that that the lens would spontaneously devevelop develop an "un-sharp" range.
... Of course an "unsharp" range is not uncommon, but not amongst lenses of this caliber.
ReplyDeleteboioioioioing!
ReplyDeleteBack in my film photography days I used to have a 200m Nikkor lens that was so long and heavy that it had a tripod mount on it. The idea of walking around with it and shooting it handheld was laughable.
ReplyDeleteGiven the advances of tiny and light lenses on mirrorless cameras, I would think that in a few years we will see something twice as small as what you have now.
It would certainly fit fit the trend. Whether there's a demand amongst enthuthiasts for special lenses that small remailns to be seen.
ReplyDeleteA large part of the reduction in size and weight comes from the reduction in sensor size, to half the linear size of 35mm film. That alone would allow weight to be reduced by a factor of 8. I'm not sure we can halve the size of sensors again and keep the same image quality.
ReplyDelete