A friend of mine has lent me his old EOS 5DM2. I'd like to do what I can to make it more suited to my needs without spending the earth because, of course, it's borrowed & at some point I'll dive in & get the best new Canon I can afford. I bought the "entry level" zoom lens mentioned in the title & it works very well. I'm up to speed with its imitations but I have no choice other than to work with it for the time being. I'd like to get a 2x teleconverter to see if I can get closer to my subjects without them flying away. The problem is, there seem to be quite a few different teleconverters & I gather they don't all fit in the same way or they somehow restrict some of the functionality of the lens. Can anyone point me in the direction of the correct/best 2x teleconverter(s) for my camera & lens combination?
nope, not worth it. teleconverters are best for primes and constant aperture zooms been there done that, even the best quality teleconverter wont help you out, reasons, the light loss from a x 2 on a vairble aperture lens esp at the longer end means you going to need to increase the iso or slow down the shutter speed, if you have a very bright sunny day or your subject is the moon / a object with its own light or you have an object that is still like a building you could possibly make it work best teleconverters are going to be the canon ef ones, word of warning with teleconverters, and as you have rightly done, getting advice, some have extended optics so where they will be of the correct mount type they may not physically fit the lens if the rear element of the lens is close to the rear mount, i have the mkIII canon extenders and they have the protruding optic, for the close to rear element lenses i use the kenko dg type for ef mount as they dont have the extended element above all i see extenders / teleconverters as a bonus item that i use very rarely, if you can try to get there naturally, i have used the x2 with the 100-400mm c but found the the 150-600mm is better at 600mm than the 100-400mm is at 800mm with x2, due to the light loss and slight decrease in image quality as my budget stops at the 150-600mm i do use the x2 on that at 600mm for moon and planets (i have the M50 so its a further 1.6 crop which means more pixels on the target) if i could afford to goto a bigger lens i would but i cant so in some respect thats where we both are with out lens limitations in needing the x2, best wildlife extenders ...............bird seed / dog biscuits !! 30mm it might be worth telling friends and family next birthday or xmas to all chip in to a new lens fund something like the sigma 100-400mm c has been my wildlife lens for 5 years now, i guess price is relative to the persons involved but for the price f it its been an excellent buy.
Thanks! Very helpful. And I do have a birthday coming so.. If I sit quietly, I can be about 3m from my feeders with the lens on full zoom & get some pretty decent shots but because the 70-300 is a long narrow tunnel, depth of field becomes the issue. I can't even get the whole bird in focus, sometimes!
tbh with 3m+ in distance i havent had any trouble with depth of field being too shallow and thats with the lens wide open most of the time.
The limit on the lens I have is 5.6 but even then, I'm getting stuff like this. (There's a good chance it's something I'm doing wrong, I'm just not sure what):
Looks the feet and bird behind are pretty sharp, as well as the bars the bird is grabbing. What focus points were active during the shot, i don't think focus grabbed the bird you wanted.
Del, may I suggest you close the appiture down a bit, this will give more longer depth of field, try using f8.00.
Actually before we go too far, i think that lens should do a back/front focus test. You can do this by using a wide aperture, and shooting a ruler at an angle with the middle focus point as a point of reference, and see if the fall off in front and behind is working as expected. If your using a teleconverter and If the lens back or front focuses, at a long mm range and wide fstop you will really notice the problem as you may have zero room for error with those factors. You may have to calibrate the lens on the camera, I'm not saying this is needed, but assuming that front bird was what the focus point was aiming for, then it seems it is back focusing. https://livesnaplove.com/blog/how-to-check-focus-of-lens-for-front-focus-back-focus https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/tips-and-solutions/how-to-test-your-lens
Thanks for the replies. Okay, so the lens I have is a Canon EF 70-300 1:4-5:6 lens so, as far as I can tell, it doesn't allow me to have a smaller aperture. Also (again, as far as I can tell... By which I mean that when I follow the steps in the manual, the settings I'm looking for don't show up on the camera) it doesn't allow me to select which dot pattern I would prefer. All things being equal, I would like to have only the centre dot selecting focus so that I can point, get first pressure for focus & then adjust for composition & shoot. Because I can't do this with this lens, I tend to only use manual focus. I selected the picture above simply to show how shallow the depth of field is. I probably had the lens on manual focus & I probably did focus on the rear bird (although the other one may have arrived as I took the pic). Here are another couple of examples: As you can see, the tails of both the Robin & Great Tit (or is that a Coal Tit) fledglings slip out of focus slightly. To be honest, I think it's the limitations of my lens which, at full zoom makes a very long thin tube that doesn't let much light in. That & the fact that it doesn't seem to be sophisticated enough to give me access to the settings I need could be my main issue. I do think I get a better focus manually that when it's on automatic so maybe I should look into calibrating it & see if I can get automatic focus sharper, but I'm often shooting through things so it's academic really if I can't select the centre point.
I misunderstood and thought you were having trouble achieving focus on this lens you picked up. I suggested the wide aperture to test the focus on a ruler, you can increase DOF and get both birds in focus if you stop down to maybe f11, problem is you need make up for it somewhere else, so you either slow the shutter which probably isn't an option with the birds, or increase the iso and you may get a bit more grain. This goes back to Craigs suggesting to stop down a bit and gain more DOF if your need a little bit more of the scene in focus. It is not the limitations specifically of your lens, DOF impacts all lenses with the same math.. You are right that you have a small window of focus, this is where mathematics behind DOF come in, but basically the more you zoom in and the wider the aperture, and the closer to the subject you are you will have smaller window of in focus so f4 at 300mm can be only inches of depth of field depending how close to the subject you are. Have a play with the numbers here so you can see how DOF is affected: https://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html Its all a balancing act of shutter / aperture etc... depending on the needs of what your shooting. Ill post separately about the focus issue mentioned, I assume your using the 5d2 you mentioned originally.
Ok lets talk focusing, As I understand you are using a 5d2, which I own, It is a wonderfull full featured camera despite its age it can still be a semi pro workhorse today.. I dug up the link to the user manual if you do not have it, you can read through it for things your curious about. https://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/0/0300004270/02/eos5dmkii-im5-c-en.pdf the Mark 2 based on the time it was designed has 9 focus points in a grid, so its auto focus is good but not as great as the newer mark 4 obviously because that has 61 points. But I am off track a bit here. Also, canon uses a multiple drive modes for if your doing 1 shot, or rapid fire and trying to track movement through 10 shots, this starts on page 77. If your rapid shooting bird this could help On page 81 it shows how you can use the button with AF grid/magnification in the upper right of the back of the body plus spinning the dial to change how focus points work. By default it uses all 9 and looks at the contrast in the scene to try and gauge what to focus on which will not always agree with the photographer. I use center point on mine, and half press the shutter to refocus if needed as my primary method of madness to keep focus. The process on page 81 is standard of canon cameras in general, you can use the dial to flip between ALL or dial it to an exact point you want to use, which may be very handy on a tripod with a already framed up scene. You really do not need to use manual focus with this camera middle point + minor recompose should work in at least 98% of the scenes your shooting.
Thanks, I do have the manual & I tried the thing with choosing grid points (with the aim of selecting centre) but I couldn't make it work & assumed it was a limitation of the lens. I shall check again. I have another (off thread) question that has always intrigued me with digital photography (& will truly show me up for a lack of understanding, I'm sure) but... Why do we still have to balance aperture, shutter speed & film speed? I mean, no actual film is being exposed. Surely I should be able to fix an aperture & shutter speed of my choice & the camera will just look at the scene & "expose" it appropriately. *hides*
Your AF points are all in camera, an af lens should work the same as any. Regarding exposure, exposure triangle still applies, you set a shutter and aperture, only so much light will get in. Thus the sensor is effectively the film, and will have to compensate with ISO the same way, the ISO on the camera is the mathematical equivalent of the same iso film sensitivity to light. The big difference here is that digital noise outperforms film grain, which was not true with a digital camera 20 years ago, sensors have improved a lot.
I suppose what I'm thinking is that the sensor doesn't have to be tucked away inside the camera, does it? I mean the "triangle" could all be effectively outside the camera, as there's no film to worry about. Anyway, I'm probably talking out the back of my head! I'm off to find those AF points!! Thanks for your help.
Think of it as a black box, and you open a small hole for a small amount of time, those are the shutter and aperture variables. There is a measurable amount of light that gets in. Be it a film or a digital sensor, (or a glass plate in cameras before film)...... that will be the way to record the image from the light allowed in. Sensitivity to light is ISO/ASA and simply a way to measure that sensitivity.
No, I understand that, but the sensor doesn't have to be tucked away. Now that we're free of film (or coated glass) with light sensitivity, I'm surprised they haven't done a ground up re-think & just basically re-invented the camera & made it triangle free. I mean, ISO/ASA only refers to film sensitivity in so far as there was an amount of, what was it, silver nitrate(?) to be exposed. We don't have that any more. I remember going to a gig & using, if I remember correctly, a Fuji 1400 (possibly 1600) ASA film to be able to take concert photos without a flash. It was very successful. I used up the film in daylight, so that I could send it off to be processed (remember those days?) & the daylight shots were super grainy. It actually looked really cool, but it showed up the lack of light sensitive coating which was, of course, the thing that allowed it to be exposed so quickly. None of that exists any more so to design a camera so that it replicates film sensitivity when it doesn't need to... Well, like I say, there must me some reason they haven't done it. I should probably just shut up.
Anyway, thanks to you @johnsey I now have a greater understanding of how to access the settings I was after. I'd convinced myself that some of the settings were unavailable to me because of the lens but now I know they're all in camera, I've looked a bit harder at the manual, found them & my control over the situation has increased greatly. Baby steps, of course, but steps nonetheless. Thanks!
@Caladina Does the Sigma lens you mentioned interact properly with the camera? I just bought a third party 500mm lens in the hope of getting closer to my subject (without the need for a teleconverter), which it does. Sadly there is no interactivity with the camera so I'm limited in what I can do with it.
YES, the 2 sigma zooms mentioned above will work on any canon DSLR if they are EF mount, sigma makes their lenses for multiple brands and mounts so b sure they are the EF mount ones. Which 500mm lens did you buy? There are third party lenses that are fully manual, this should have been clearly listed where you purchased it. Third party lenses save money by not including the electronics in some lenses, for example the TTArtisan is only $330 where as the Canon primes are $2300 used for the gen one f4.5 and i think upwards of $6k for the gen 2 f4. Removing features like focusing and stabilization can really help a small 3rd party make a lightweight cheap alternative to the expensive ones, as you see its also not as fast at 6.3 as the canon ones., Not sure if the TTartisan is the one you got but you can see they list is as manual, if the subject isn't moving and you can focus, it seems like a good value for the price as this brand seemed to have pretty decent optical performance given its budget build. This is from the B&H site... I do however think opting on the side of getting the reach via a lens over teleconverter is always the preferred option, they will soften the image and sacrifice multiple f stops which really slow down whatever lens you mount them on. Converters are a useful tool, but should not be the primary solution.
Oh, trust me, I'm not spending anything like that kind of money as it's a borrowed camera. It was one of these: https://opteka.com/products/opteka-500mm-f-8-hd-telephoto-mirror-lens A fully manual mirror lens that I definitely don't have the experience to make good use of. But also, the top right hand corner of every photo had a blurry white area. As though light was leaking in. Probably my inexperience again, as I'm still learning the basics, but I could barely get a decent shot out of it and if I have to fart around with the settings for every single shot, it's no use to me. Birds don't hang around waiting to be photographed! Now that I have the AF sorted on the 70-300 lens & I've found the depth of field preview button, I feel much better equipped to press on & take better shots with the lenses I have. (The camera was lent to me with a fixed 100 which has a superb macro feature.) Both lenses are Canon's own. There are 500 & 600mm Canon-made EF lenses but they're megabucks. Perhaps I should check out the Sigma lenses some time soon.
