New lens: "An expensive big tube"

My new lens arrived on Friday - a second hand Canon 400mm f5.6. Or, as the Girl put it, "an expensive big tube". I've since tried it out at Abberton and Rainham. That I'm not yet getting the best out of it is obvious, but even so the shots I have managed are far, far better than those that would have come from the old lens - as you'd hope, for the price difference. 

The old lens was a 75-300mm. The problem was that beyond 200-220mm it started to get fuzzy. While you could take a reasonable image at 300mm - in good light - and then make it more acceptable by liberal application of PhotoShop and some zooming out and cropping, you may as well have zoomed out on the lens, taken it at 200mm and saved yourself the trouble. More often than not, you were in turd-polishing territory. And so, if you wanted a "decent" image rather than a record shot you'd find yourself not bothering if the subject was firmly in the 200-300mm range. Additionally, the autofocus was slow - a fast moving flock of finches, for instance, was almost impossible for the lens to keep up with. 

The most immediate (and predictable) difference is that the new lens makes plausible shots that previously I'd not have even bothered to try. The extra reach is amazingly useful. The autofocus is fast, almost instant; it can lock on to things like fast moving finches, provided I can get the camera aimed in time. Which is itself slightly harder as the camera's spot focussing feels more sensitive. This is probably due to the extra reach, but I don't know yet. Whatever. It is, so far, a very satisfying tool. Hopefully, as I learn how to use the big tube properly, the images I post will get a bit better. Hopefully.

As a brief note, I've still not installed PhotoShop since my last restart, so these images have not really been enhanced at all beyond a crop and a resize. I'm having to make do with GIMP which, while free, doesn't seem to have the same power as PS does when it comes to stuff like area selection and noise reduction/sharpening/etc. From my experience, GIMP's area selection stuff is rubbish, and really, really slow and memory intensive. Of course, maybe this is just me not knowing how to find and use these tools properly because GIMP's interface is a steaming pile of poo, but I'm sure I could coax a bit more out of these with PS.

Of course, using it properly and getting decent photos is reliant on you being smart enough to have the lens with you at the right times. I'm sometimes not. 

It was delivered to the office late on Friday morning and I'd deliberately taken my camera in to work intending to do some lunch time photography. I made a good start by leaving it in the office, ready and attached to camera, while I popped out to get lunch. I'm still not sure how I managed this. On the walk, a walk that I do almost every single day marvelling at it's utter birdlessness, a patch mega dropped, perhaps inevitably, onto a barge between HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge.  

Common sandpiper. Shit. Ok, so I've seen hundreds of them - I've even seen them from my sofa, and once counted six from the flat. I don't often give them much time or attention, but this one was on the work patch, an area so devoid of avian life that I sometimes still get excited when I see a cormorant. In this context, a common sand is pure gold. And I'd left the camera. 

Said barge with accompanying sandpiper was moored just out from City Hall, normally about two minutes walk from the office. I made it to the office and back in about two. 

Needless to say, the bird had buggered off.