Completely agree. Most pro wildlife photographers do just fine with a 400/f2.8, a 600/f4, or an 800/f5.6, and i’ve seen some excellent shots taken with less expensive lenses like 80-400 and even 70-200 zooms.
If those big prime telephoto lenses aren’t long enough for you, then your biggest challenge isn’t the equipment; it’s that you’re not getting close enough to your quarry.
I think at some point, the purpose of high-end lenses ceases to be about taking better photographs, and instead becomes about ostentatious display of disposable income. Same for audio accessories, and probably a bunch of other hobby equipment.
Seems more likely.
Probably because they are filming an episode of Doctor Who there.
The difference between a camera lens and a telescope is not the performance. It’s the features. Camera lenses have adjustable aperture, and a wide focus range. Most modern camera lenses have focus motors for autofocus.
Also, telescopes are generally slow (large F number) and not designed to provide a large flat field, so they can have a lot of field curvature and other off-axis aberrations. There are telescopes optimized for photography (called “astrographs”) but they still lack the focus range, adjustable aperture, etc.
You think the National Geographic bought a 1200/5.6 lens for bragging rights?
It just scales linearly. If you want 1/100 inch resolution (I think sufficient to read printed text) from 100 ft away, that’s a resolution of 8.3e-6 radian, or about 1.7 arcsecond. You just need a 60mm diameter lens for that.
I cannot speak for Chronos of course but I think his point is there are relatively few people who would have need of such a lens. That is not to say no one cannot find a use for it and NatGeo would seem to be one but considering the lens the sheikh bought it is probably for bragging rights more than anything (that or to look in his neighbor’s window).
I doubt it. Someone who can blow $ 2 millions on a lense can afford to see loins from up close for much less than that.
Bragging rights is a possibility, but after all, if money was of no concern, plenty of people would own very marginally useful items just because they would want to have the best for whatever their hobby is, not just to show off.
It’s not just text documents that the President needs to worry about being accidentally photographed.
I will say that these super lenses, whislt fairly amazing, are nothing compared to serious survalience and other scientific optics. What makes them so expensive is simply that they are one offs. Leica could probaby put the lens into production, and charge only a few tens of thousands for one. Depending upon how many they thought they might sell. Of course there might be a coda to the contract that says the rights to manufacture belong to the sheik. But any custom, designed from scrach, high-tech equpiment is going to have eye-watering prices.
No doubt the optics have flourite glass elements and figured and optimised to an accuracy that is as good as obtainable. Plus the contract paid for a prototype (or more). And Leica will have expected to make a nice profit. Compared to a miltary contract for a one-off mil-spec item, $2m is cheap.
Absolutey! I’ve played with one in the wild. The slightest quiver, & instead of the flower you were about to shoot, you’re now aiming three trees over.
VR or IS, IMO, is never as sharp as a lens on a tripod and if you do use either you shouldn’t be using a tripod (per the manufacturers). It’s meant to mitigate vibration from hand holding, movement, etc. Very nifty and I really like this technology as it allows for a “slower” lens to make shots that it couldn’t.
Any ways, does anyone know how far the photogs were from the President and Prime Minister? It wouldn’t be hard to rig up a simple test in my house to see if any of my lenses could resolve anything at the approximate distance.
Actually, and I say this as a fairly good wildlife photographer, your lenses are never long enough. Getting close enough to your quarry is rarely an option, given that birds and beasties are often skittish, sometimes dangerous, and almost always separated from the photographer by rivers, bogs, hostile terrain, or, most frequently, simply signs that say “Wildlife Preserve – no access beyond this point”.
But, to get back to the OP, I ran a couple of experiments with my wildlife photography gear. Using a document with probably 14 point type, it was not even remotely a challenge to get a readable image at 40 feet, handheld, in low light conditions. Outside, at dusk, aiming into the sunset (and with a tree partially in the way), I could get a legible image (with some squinting) at 100 feet. You could certainly do better than that under ideal conditions – bright, even light and a camera on a tripod. I tried 160 feet, but ended up with a gray blur that might or might not be able to be enhanced in Photoshop.
This was handheld, with a very good quality 500mm lens on a camera with a 1.6 crop factor, so an equivalent of 800mm. This would be a rather obtrusive lens to bring into a press conference, but the smaller Canon 300mm lens is legendary for its sharpness and is not a bad choice for portrait photography because of its ability to blur the background.
You are correct, mostly. The 2 most important aspects of “performance” with a telescope as opposed to a camera lens are aperture size (light gathering) and resolution.
Focus range & adj. aperture are unimportant. Very few camera lenses will approach the diffraction limit in angular resolution while amateur sized telescopes would be considered defective if they did not, especially on high contrast targets. While field curvature and various other off axis aberrations are present in all telescopes their generally long focal lengths relative to photo lenses usually prevents them from becoming a problem, at least using common sensor sizes.
Generally camera lenses on the other hand must meet a wider variety of requirements. Telephoto construction means a separate negative achromat, possible zooming, minimizing secondary spectrum, correction of curvature of field, astigmatism etc., etc. presents an immensely complex design and design problems. All of this means that if a photo lens was used as a telescope visually they would range from terrible to barely passable while looking fine when used with a camera.