AlphaWorld
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I've been carrying the 2x TC with me while venturing out with the A7RV and the 200-600.
My hopes were to get a nice bright day with few clouds and some birds in flight. Well, two out of three ain't bad - no birds in sight, and that's probably a good thing - I still need practice!
Very few clouds about, and enough warmth that a Tamar wallaby was lying down.
If you take the 200-600mm and add a 2xTC, you get a zoom that's effectively 400-1200mm, and I have tried that out before. Today I wanted to add the effect of the APS-C crop, taking it up to 500-1800mm effective, and dropping the image size to 6240 x 4160 (26Mpixel).
Neither of the images below is cropped, but both have been scaled to 2000 pixels on the long size so they display at a reasonable speed. Neither of these is a great shot, but I think they make the point.
This is what a Tamar wallaby looks like through that combination - it's difficult to get far enough away!:
If I zoom out to minimum (marked as 200mm on the lens, but effectively 500mm - not far off the 600mm I'd see with the bare 200-600) we see this:
Those are hand-held.
I think I'll be using this combination again, but there is one serious issue - it's really hard to hold the 1800mm view steady on a subject! If I was trying to use this to shoot birds in flight, I think a tripod with a gimbal would be called for. And possibly less coffee, more weight training, and a chair!
I must say though, this exercise has given me new respect for the 200-600, which is a better lens than I thought, even at f/13 on the TC.
For those who are curious, the metadata on an image shot at 1800m effective reports the focal length as 1200mm, but the focal length in 35mm film as 1800mm. Fair enough.
My hopes were to get a nice bright day with few clouds and some birds in flight. Well, two out of three ain't bad - no birds in sight, and that's probably a good thing - I still need practice!
Very few clouds about, and enough warmth that a Tamar wallaby was lying down.
If you take the 200-600mm and add a 2xTC, you get a zoom that's effectively 400-1200mm, and I have tried that out before. Today I wanted to add the effect of the APS-C crop, taking it up to 500-1800mm effective, and dropping the image size to 6240 x 4160 (26Mpixel).
Neither of the images below is cropped, but both have been scaled to 2000 pixels on the long size so they display at a reasonable speed. Neither of these is a great shot, but I think they make the point.
This is what a Tamar wallaby looks like through that combination - it's difficult to get far enough away!:
If I zoom out to minimum (marked as 200mm on the lens, but effectively 500mm - not far off the 600mm I'd see with the bare 200-600) we see this:
Those are hand-held.
I think I'll be using this combination again, but there is one serious issue - it's really hard to hold the 1800mm view steady on a subject! If I was trying to use this to shoot birds in flight, I think a tripod with a gimbal would be called for. And possibly less coffee, more weight training, and a chair!
I must say though, this exercise has given me new respect for the 200-600, which is a better lens than I thought, even at f/13 on the TC.
For those who are curious, the metadata on an image shot at 1800m effective reports the focal length as 1200mm, but the focal length in 35mm film as 1800mm. Fair enough.
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So that second shot has the same field of view as I'd get from the lens without 2x or APS-C.
