Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6 L Static tests

I have been considering purchasing a Canon 100-400 L so before I took the plunge I thought I would try one out so I hired one from www.lensesforhire.co.uk. I will use the time to try and evaluate the lens and see if it is really the one I want!

My current set up is a Canon 300mm F4 L and a 1.4x Extender II, it's a great combo but I am tempted by the convenience of the zoom. I was also interested in the possibility of combining the lens with 1.4x extender to get a 560mm f8 manual focus lens as my budget definitely won't stretch to a 500mm prime lens.

I am by no means an expert at testing lenses and just wanted to try a few simple tests. Most of these have been done before and can be found on the 'net but there is nothing like personal experience.

The first test I put together was just to shoot a static high contrast target and try and compare the results. The set up was pretty basic, the card was attached to a door and illuminated with a standard lamp. The camera was mounted on a tripod and fired by remote release with mirror lock-up. The distance between camera (a Canon EOS 40D) and target was approximately 4m. Unless other wise stated auto-focus was used with only the centre spot active.

Images were captured in RAW and converted to jpg in Lightroom no sharpening was applied. The images are 100% crops from the centre of the frame.
Full size jpg files have been loaded onto Flickr.

Canon 300mm f4 L with 1.4x Extender II

420mm 1/100 @ f5.6

Full size image on Flickr

420mm, 1/50 @ f8

Full size image on Flickr

Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6 L

400mm, 1/60 @ f5.6

Full size image on Flickr

400mm, 1/30 @ f8

Full size image on flickr

Well to my untrained eye it looks like I won't be losing anything in quality at the long end, if anything the 100-400 is a little better than the 300 + 1.4x combo.
The next test I tried was to attach a 1.4x extender II to the 100-400 and tried some shots at 560mm. On my 40D autofocus is lost as the minimum aperture exceeds f5.6, so the camera was focused manually using live view with 10x magnification.
I did try taping the pins and while this did mean the camera tried to auto-focus it was erratic and not only that it ruined focusing when the extender was put onto the 300mm F4, so this isn't something I will be doing in 'real life'.

Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6 L + 1.4x Extender II

560mm, 1/50 @ f8

Full size image on Flickr

560mm, 1/25 @ f11

Full size image on Flickr

I was pleasantly surprised, whilst a little soft wide open stopping down really does improve things. time will tell if this combination is practical (I am not the best at using manual focus on moving objects).

If the weather holds out I will hopefully be able to take the lens out into the field for some real life examples.

Playing with light

It was a mostly gloomy day today with some rain and the odd spot of sunshine. I decided to break out my new Flash extender and have a go at a variety of techniques for lighting the birds in my back garden.
A makeshift hide was set up in the shed and then it was just a case of waiting!

Quite a few of our regular visitors turned up and I managed to get a few shots I liked.

This shot of a Great Tit was illuminated using flash only as at this time it was raining and very gloomy, I had to do some work in photoshop as there was a lot of reflection from the retina.

For this Starling, I used a burst of flash to try and lift the colour a little as the sky was very overcast.

And finally this Greenfinch was captured in the best light of all, sunlight!

The flash extender was great really allowing me to use flash over much longer distances than I could ever achieve without.

High Key

Gerbera
Originally uploaded by Richard Parker

Bit gloomy outside so I thought I would play around in the studio (living room) and try a bit of High Key.
Subject was lit using a Canon twinlite and the background was lit using a 430 EX as a slave.
In Lightroom I square cropped and played around with curves and saturation. Then a final tweak in Elements to clone out some blemishes on the petals.

Cathedrals in Infra Red

Last year I had my old Canon EOS 400D converted to Infra Red, this involved the replacement of the sensor's high pass filter with an Infra Red Filter.

I took advantage of the winter sun over the last two days to grab some shots during my lunch break.

Lerwick Up Helly Aa 2010

The Up Helly Aa is a Fire Festival with a Viking theme which takes place in Shetland during the winter. This year I went to the Lerwick festival on a trip organised by Shetland Wildlife.

This was an amazing spectacle which culminates with a torchlight parade and a Galley Burning, for more information on the Up Helly Aa visit www.uphellyaa.org.

Here a few images from the day, not my normal subjects but good fun all the same!

Further images can be seen in my Flickr Set, I was lucky enough to have two of the images featured on the Flickr Blog.

First Post

Welcome to my blog!

I have set this up to share my passion for photography, in particular nature photography.

I haven’t got a definite plan as yet but will attempt to document my excursions taking photographs of the wildlife in and around London and Kent and anything else I get up to with my photography.
Hopefully I will become more stuctured as time goes.