supertelephoto

Review of the Canon RF400mm f/2.8L and RF600mm f/4L Lenses

Camera Labs' Gordon Laing was given the opportunity to test the two largest and most expensive lenses for Canon's mirrorless RF system -- the Canon RF400mm f/2.8L and the Canon RF600mm f/4L -- and has evaluated how they stack up in stills and video tests.

Olympus Shows Off 2000mm Reach by Shooting Mt. Fuji from 42 Miles Away

With the major Japanese trade show CP+ being cancelled over coronavirus concerns, Olympus has taken to YouTube to share the presentation it was planning to give at the show. The 45-minute presentation included an interesting look at how much reach the new M.Zuiko Digital ED 150-400mm f/4.5 TC1.25x IS PRO lens gives when combined with the M.Zuiko Digital 2x Teleconverter MC-20.

Shooting Portraits with Sony’s $12,000 400mm f/2.8 G Master Lens

Photographer Miguel Quiles recently got his hands on one of the few Sony FE 400mm f/2.8 GM OSS lenses currently in existence (the $12,000 lens won't hit store shelves until late September). In the 6-minute video above, Quiles shares about his tests in using the super-telephoto lens for portraits.

Here’s What You Get When You Shoot Portraits With a 500mm Lens

Portrait photographers generally pick focal lengths somewhere between 80mm and 135mm, which produces a flattened perspective distortion when the subject fills up the frame. Photographer Keydrin Franklin of 924photography recently decided to try his hand with shooting portraits with a 500mm super-telephoto lens.

A First Look at Sigma’s Monster Prime, the 500mm f/4 Sport

Sigma’s new 500mm f/4 Sport is getting a lot of attention. It might be because it’s the first telephoto prime in its new ART/SPORT series of lenses, or it might be because of the price tag of $5,999. That’s $3,000 less than the Canon and almost $4,300 less than the Nikon, while only being $1,000 more than the older Sigma 500mm f/4.5.

A Photographic Journey with the Legendary Canon EF 1200mm Lens

Someone, somewhere, recently decided to bid a fond farewell to one of the most legendary telephoto lenses ever made, the Canon EF 1200mm f/5.6 L USM. Now that it is at the B&H SuperStore, a group of photographers from B&H were given the opportunity to take this optical giant out for a unique shooting experience.

Review: Canon’s 200-400mm f/4L IS 1.4x Stretches Focal Length and Wallets

If camera manufacturers were high school boys, building super telephoto zooms would be their equivalent of a pissing contest to see who can shoot the farthest or most accurately. Sports photographers would arrive at the stadium packing the biggest lens to win bragging rights, acting like Arnold Schwarzenegger slinging his Gatling gun in Terminator. But Canon’s super telephoto zoom, the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM, is getting long in the tooth, and it’s time to say, “hasta la vista, baby” to that lens.

Use a Red Dot Sight for Locating Subjects with Super Telephoto Lenses

Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:

They're designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible -- the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.

Malcolm reports that the site "works amazingly well", making it "trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly".

Homemade 900mm Super Telephoto Lens

Over at Leica User Forum, member dkpeterborough wrote a series of posts detailing how he and a fellow member of the Peterborough Photographic Society named Tony Lovell created a beastly 900mm lens. The lens uses optics salvaged from a government flight simulator projector lens, and cost only hundreds of pounds in parts (comparable lenses cost thousands).