karmicdragonfly: (Default)
[personal profile] karmicdragonfly
Bad...but in kind of a good way -- not something I needed, but I splurged and bought a new camera lens! I already had a EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM -- shown to the left below. Today I just received a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM. At this point, my intent is to sell the 70-200.


My primary use cases for a long zoom are moon pictures and macros of insects. Unsurprisingly, butterflies, etc. don't particularly like it when you hover over them with a typical macro lens, so I have been using my 200 for that. And I have reached my limit on how close I can get to the moon with my current equipment.

It was a rainy day, so I just took some shots inside to play around, comparing the new 100-400 with the 70-200. The aperture won't open as wide on the 100-400 as the 200, and since I was also using a 1.4x extender, I wanted to keep the settings the same for all the shots. So I set the settings to ISO 6400 and f/8.

Then I took pics both fully zoomed out and fully zoomed in while sitting on my couch aiming at a particular ornament on the tree.

Here's the 70-200 fully zoomed out (70 mm):


Compared to the 100-400 fully zoomed out (100 mm):


70-200 fully zoomed in (200):


100-400 fully zoomed in (400):


*****
And here's what each looks like with the 1.4x extender.

70-200 fully zoomed out with 1.4x extender (98 mm):


100-400 fully zoomed out with 1.4x extender (140 mm):



70-200 fully zoomed in with 1.4x extender (280 mm):


100-400 fully zoomed in with 1.4x extender (560):


No surprises, lol -- the 100-400 can zoom further. But I was happy to confirm that the 1.4x extender worked fine with the new lens (although as expected I lose an f/stop using it), and autofocus continued to work with it. One note though is that I only tested the autofocus with a center focus point, so I don't know if other focus points would work.

When I labeled the pics above, I used what Lightroom indicated as the zoom length in the photo metadata, but I believe since I'm using a 7D Mark II (which is a crop sensor) that I am getting additional zoom beyond what the numbers indicate above. The 7D Mark II has a 1.6 factor crop sensor. If I understand correctly, here's how the arithmetic works: 400mm zoom * 1.6 crop factor * 1.4x extender = 896mm. Compare that to the old lens: 200mm zoom * 1.6 crop factor * 1.4x extender = 448mm.

I'm looking forward to trying out this lens when the moon is visible next!
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karmicdragonfly

July 2025

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"O seguro morreu de velho, mas o desconfiado ainda está vivo." -- "The safe one died of old age, but the suspicious one is still living."