{"id":6739,"date":"2013-06-12T16:53:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T20:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stayfocusedpress.com\/blog\/?p=6739"},"modified":"2021-02-05T17:32:23","modified_gmt":"2021-02-05T22:32:23","slug":"a-long-lens-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/?p=6739","title":{"rendered":"A Long Lens Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Avoiding the $8,500 shock<\/h2>\n

Those of us who like to hunt wildlife with a camera know that you can never have enough mm of lens. But sticker shock kicks in when you look at the prices for a fast super-telephoto lens. Last year I made it a high priority to seek out an alternative way to acquire one of these highly sought after gems and ended up with a prized lens at a bargain basement price.<\/p>\n

My lucky catch doesn’t have the features of late model glass, but neither does it doesn’t carry an $8,500 price tag. Instead of the a brand spanking new 400mm f\/2.8 with auto focusing and vibration reduction I picked up a used 400mm f\/3.5 manual focus lens. As you’ll see, although it lacks the convenience of the high price spread, it performs very well for my type of shooting. And at a price of about $600, it is a steal. If you’re a lover of long lenses that isn’t willing to take a mortgage out to buy one, follow along to see if the used lens approach can satisfy your equipment wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
To be exact, my “find” is a Nikkor ED IF AI-S 400mm f\/3.5 lens. There are no marks or scratches on any of the lens surfaces. The lens body shows heavy wear and a few scratches to the paint. It has a tripod collar, a built-in lens hood and accepts affordable 39mm drop-in filters or expensive very 122mm external filters.<\/p>\n

Mechanically, this lens has high quality optics; manual internal focusing (lens barrel does not extend or retract as it is focused) and automatic indexing so that the camera can determine the aperture setting.<\/td>\n

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To try out the lens, I mounted it on a Nikon D600 body. Notice the white dot on the lens.<\/center><\/td>\n
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Simply line up the white dot on the lens with the white dot on the camera body and twist counter-clockwise.<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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This monster of a lens weighs more than 6 pounds. You won’t want to handhold this camera and lens combo for very long.<\/p>\n

While it is possible to mount this combo directly onto a tripod, a more practical solution is to use a gimbal mount.<\/p>\n

Here’s one that I use.<\/td>\n

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Using the tripod collar on the lens, the combo is screwed onto the gimbal. The gimbal itself is mounted and balanced onto the tripod.<\/p>\n

With the arrangement, you can now frictionlessly tilt, swivel and pan the camera and lens combo to take aim of your subject.<\/td>\n

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There’s one final step to complete before we can use this older lens with a newer camera body.<\/p>\n

Newer Nikkor lenses owe their intelligence to a tiny CPU which controls the exposure settings. Since this lens does not have a CPU, you must “register” this lens to the camera by setting its maximum (widest) aperture. The Tools<\/strong> menu has an item for doing this.<\/td>\n

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Having registered the lens, there are two options for setting the exposure: ‘M” manual, where you set both the shutter speed and aperture or “A” aperture priority, where you set the aperture and the camera sets the appropriate shutter speed.<\/p>\n

In either case, you rotate the aperture ring on the lens to the desired lens opening. In “M” mode, you also dial in the camera shutter speed. In “A” mode, the camera automatically sets the shutter speed.<\/p>\n

You’re all set to take aim, carefully focus and fire away. Here’s a few of my first shots with the lens.<\/td>\n

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This photo is a full frame capture of a colorful duck. The lens’ large focusing ring lets me easily bring things into sharp focus.<\/center><\/td>\n
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To give you an idea of the quality of the lens, this is an enlargement of the duck’s head taken from the photo on the left.<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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How sharp is this lens? Full frame shot at f\/5.6.<\/center><\/td>\n
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The enlargement here looks pretty sharp to me.<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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In this comparison of the same capture at f\/3.5 and f\/5.6 you’ll see a noticeable drop in sharpness when using the widest opening. The lesson for me: stop down to achieve the sharpest photographs.<\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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At first I was a little hesitant about buying an older lens without the autofocus and autoexposure features that I’ve come to expect from newer lenses. After all, this lens comes from the early 1980s; isn’t it obsolete? Now that I’ve had some positive experience, I realize that quality equipment lasts for many years.<\/p>\n

I feel that I hit the jackpot with this lens at a great price. Now I’m hoping to find some time to capture many more birds in the future.
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\nWritten by Arnie Lee
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\nNOTE: <\/strong>While this article featured Nikon equipment, I’m hoping to look for similar money-saving angles for my Canon equipment.
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Avoiding the $8,500 shock Those of us who like to hunt wildlife with a camera know that you can never have enough mm of lens. But sticker shock kicks in when you look at the prices for a fast super-telephoto lens. Last year I made it a high priority to seek out an alternative way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[238,181,8,24,4],"tags":[432,433,434,193,25,613],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6739"}],"version-history":[{"count":94,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10364,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6739\/revisions\/10364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arnielee.com\/sfp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}