Panned action shots, taken at a distance of 60 to 70 metres
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3,
800mm f/5.6, 1/45 sec., 800mm f/5.6, 1/30 sec.,
f27 at ISO 200, beanbag f32 at ISO 200, beanbag
Even at distances of 80 to 100 metres, you can use this lens to pick out your subject and separate it nicely from the background.
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3,
800mm f/5.6, 1/1500 sec., 800mm f/5.6, 1/1500 sec.,
f8 at ISO 400, beanbag f8 at ISO 400, beanbag
The strong compression effects give backlit shots a special look of their own, and are especially easy to shoot using the camera's "Highlight Tone Priority" (HTP) shooting mode. Exposure compensation is only necessary if you are shooting directly into the sun. The 800mm f/5.6 has obviously never heard of chromatic aberrations, and sharpness and contrast are excellent, even in backlit situations. It's just not possible to produce equivalent performance using shorter lenses with teleconverters. And yes, you can use the 800mm with a teleconverter too. A colleague tested it with a 1.4x converter on his 1D Mark IV, and autofocus worked perfectly.
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark 3,
800mm f/5.6, 1/500 sec., 800mm f/5.6, 1/500 sec.,
f6.7 at ISO 200, beanbag f8 at ISO 400, beanbag
Some situations challenged even the 800mm's enormous range when used with the EOS-1Ds Mark III, so I attached the lens to my EOS 7D (with its 1.6x crop factor) and turned it into a new telescope-style secret weapon. I used the flash shoe as a rear sight and the fixing screw on the sunshade as a bead to help me find my target. The skills left over from my basic rifle training as a youth gave me the right breathing technique to help me follow running animals through the viewfinder, but I nonetheless managed to produce quite a lot of badly-framed waste. But lenses like these, with all their inherent problems, are only meant for use in extreme situations anyway - and the gnus' birth season was exactly such a situation (and the reason I was in Africa at all).
On the left: subject distance approximately 100 metres. Sharpness is excellent, in spite of the hard light and the mist.
Canon EOS 7D, Canon EOS 7D,
800mm f/5.6 (1280mm equivalent), 800mm f/5.6 (1280mm equivalent),
1/750sec., f5.6 at ISO 200, 1/500sec., f6.3 at ISO 200,
beanbag beanbag
Then came the type of day that some photographers can only dream of. We heard that African wild dogs had found their way to the South Serengeti for the first time in more than twenty-four years, so we dropped everything and headed off to search for that most elusive of subjects.
Canon EOS 7D, Canon EOS 7D,
800mm f/5.6 (1280mm equivalent), 800mm f/5.6 (1280mm equivalent),
1/400sec., 1/500sec.,
f7.1 at ISO 200, f5.6 at ISO 200,
beanbag handheld at sunset
You can use a lens like this creatively too, provided that the weather is clear and the air is fairly dust-free. The extreme focal length produces strong compression effects, and gnus that are, in reality, trotting along behind one another suddenly become part of an endless Serengeti Express (see below).
Canon EOS 7D, 800mm f/5.6 (1280mm equivalent)
1/400 sec., f8 at ISO 200,
beanbag
And, for good measure, some baby hyenas - a rare sight so close up
Canon EOS 7D, Canon EOS 7D,
800mm f/5.6 800mm f/5.6
(1280mm equivalent), (1280mm equivalent),
1/500 sec., 1/90 sec.,
f9.5 at ISO 200, f13 at ISO 200,
beanbag beanbag
Canon, Nikon or Both?
The basic switch from Nikon to Canon (or, in this case, using both in parallel) didn't present me with too many technical problems. Fortunately, there were no manuals provided with the Canon gear, so I was able to shoot away without getting lost in any strange menu trees. I only really missed Nikon's second control dial, and (without the manual) ended up having to set the aperture using aperture-priority mode. I really liked the Canon way of setting the AF point using the main dial. This is much quicker and easier to use than the Nikon thumbwheel. I preferred the 1Ds-III's exposure characteristics, too: a reddish glowing lion, captured in the first rays of the morning sun kept its colours admirably, while the Nikon D3 (especially since the most recent firmware update) seems to give all colours a neutral cast. Here are a few unprocessed (but converted) RAW images:
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III Nikon D3
My Nikon D3 - equipped with the most recent firmware and checked over by Nikon Service - appears to have some kind of compulsion towards exposing neutrally and as far to the right as possible. The image files are generally OK, but often require such extreme tweaking during conversion that I can no longer enter them for competitions.
Druckversion