I think part of it is just an 'eye' thing. I am forever seeing very
distant things that look intriguing to me and often wish I had a longer
lens with me. On the other hand, I have to work to see wide angle
possibilities.
Another thing is perspective. the same thing shot at the same scale can
have a very different look from different distances. This shot
<http://home.attbi.com/0.000000E+00dreammoose/wsb/html/view.cgi-photo.html--SiteID-137389.html>
doesn't do justice to the original, which doesn't do justice to what I
saw, but I love the compressed perspective. I wished so badly that I'd
had a full tripod and the 150-500mm along to catch the magic of late
afternoon light glinting off those leaves at a different scale. This
also happens to be a shot that simply couldn't be made with a shorter
lens, as there was nothing but air above the valley between me and the
subject. There is another image near there that I'm going to get right
one day. A cluster of trees on a much more distant hill in the other
direction has the otherworldly look of an ancient temple/circle. Seen
from closer up, the same spot is just some houses and scattered trees on
a slight rise - nothing magic at all.
Another is reach. The 300/4.5, with its 3.5m minimum focus, needs
extension tubes for this, but some other long lenses do better. My
Tokina AT-X 150-500/5.6 focuses down to 2.5m at all focal lengths and
the Tamron SP 60-300mm/3.8-5.4 focuses to 1.9m before even going into
macro mode. One can take closeups of things one can't get close too or
where getting close would scare off the subject. A 500mm lens is about
10 times as far away as a 50mm for the same magnification.
Combining perspective and reach, the far corner of my yard taken from
the porch with a 500mm lens looks very different from a shot at the same
scale from 4-5 ft. away with a 50mm and quite different again with an 18
or 21mm even closer. The relationships of the various elements in the
image change dramatically with these distance differences.
And the usual. Although I live in a 'city', we have a Red Tail hawks
nest across the street and way up a tree. It takes at least 1000mm to
get decent shots of the action up there.
Moose
Thomas Heide Clausen wrote:
Uhmm...what are you using such long lenses for, I wonder?
The longest I own is the 300/4.5 - and I think I have taken about 25
frames with thatone. It is nice for those few times I need to reach
far, but I could not justify anything more expensive (as both the
250, 350 and 500 are). I also have the 1.4 teleconverter, but I have
yet to find reason to mount that on the 300mm.
I'm kinda curious as to which types of photography such "long"
(extreme?) focal lengths are being used for by fellow zuikoholics.
Are everyone bird/wildlife/motorsports photographers, or is it just
that big glass is facinating? Or, and most likely, perhaps I am just
missing out of something... :)
Please, enlighten me....
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