Canon lenses choice for wildlife

[John Sheehy]

i'm a little curious about the choice of the 1D -- i don't think there are many situatios that the difference between 5 and 8 fps is a make or break,

You mean the 1DmkII, I assume.  The 1D is a lot slower, I thought.

for calibration, my standard is the ability to make excellent 13x19s from full frame images - the 300 +1.4 and the 100-400 will both do this (but any larger is problematic) -- John probably disagrees, but i have not been abel do this with the 300+2 or 100-400+1.4 (at least not at apertures useable in a safari situation. 
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As I've said before, I don't necessarily put on a TC to get "a frame"; I put on a TC to get the SUBJECT.  The TC goes on when the subject would otherwise be lost in a large frame of worthless material, without it.  The equivalent is not printing the full frame at the same size; the equivalent is printing the SUBJECT at the same size.  Cropping deeply into a TC-less image enlarges demosaicing artifacts, banding articfacts, has lower-frequency noise visible from further away, etc.  The quality of the SUBJECT can improve with over-sampling the optics by a small degree.

If the lighting is sufficient, I can clearly see whether it is a bird's crown or eyes that are in sharpest focus with the TCs on the camera.  I can't see that level of detail without them, and focus is more likely to be a bit off and not visible until I look at the images at home on the computer.

[dlashier]

You mean the 1DmkII, I assume.  The 1D is a lot slower, I thought.
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The 1D is also 8 fps.

- DL

[John Sheehy]

The 1D is also 8 fps.
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Yes, I just looked it up, and 8 it is.

[Phuong]

i'm a little curious about the choice of the 1D -- i don't think there are many situatios that the difference between 5 and 8 fps is a make or break, although i've filled the buffer shooting raw a few times - although again i can't say i lost much waiting for the write.  i'd also be surprised if you can find a significant image quality difference between the 1D andd 20D

what i'm really looking for in the 1D is its ability to tracking focus really fast (AI Servo). the 20D with only 9 focus points sometimes makes it very difficult to track a fast moving subject. i've lost tons of images due to this limitation

On the other hand, if you're willing to carry the weight, a 300 2.8 will make a big difference in focus speed and image quality -- consider that you can buy a 2nd 20D and 300 2.8 for about the same money as a 1D and 300 f4.
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this is a strong point. it makes me stop to think for a second.. but oh well, that 300/2.8 is too big & too heavy for me

even with 2 bodies, i'd rather have a 100-400 on one body and the 70-200 on the other. The 300 f4 just doesn't provide enough improvement over the 100-400 to be worth the trouble.

i'll go back to back to the store and try these two lenses again, before making my final decision.

by the way, regarding the 100-400mm, i've heard that it is possible to autofocus with the center focus point when combine with the 1.4x - the 1D will do because it can AF with lenses that have maximum aperture of f/8 and up. and while this limit is f/5.6 for the 20D, it'll also AF if you tape off some pins on the lens. is this true? if it's true then is it safe to do that?
once again thanks for your very helpful advices stever!

[stever]

i agree with the relatively slow focus of the 20d and nearly always use a single spot for moving subjects (with AI servo) -- i'm not sure that faster focus with more points solves this because the camera may still not decide to focus where you want it to

if the 1D will autofocus at f8, that would be useful -- but i expect it will be very slow like the EOS 3 -- can somebody comment on this?

i'd suggest going so far as to rent the lenses for comparison before buying - it will take a few hours to do a thorough test - i found this to be very worthwhile understanding what i could expect the lenses to do (and not do)


all i can say to John is that his experience with cropping and re-sizing in Photoshop is completely different than mine

[John Sheehy]

all i can say to John is that his experience with cropping and re-sizing in Photoshop is completely different than mine
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That could be the optics involved, and it can be our difference in purpose or expectation.  I wouldn't expect a 100-400mm f/5.6 lens that costs $1300 to become an excellent 200-800mm f/16 lens with a 2x converter.  What I do expect is to get a bit more of the detail of the subject, focus more precisely, and have smaller pixel/digital/bayer artifacts in the best shots I can manage, unobtainable without the magnification.  It's all about spreading the optics across more pixels, to milk the optics of all they have, for small subjects that would need to be cropped anyway.

Regardless, I lose quite a bit of subject detail in the non-TC shots, as compared to the best TC shots.  Reducing an image to the pixel size it would be without the TC, and upsampling it back, loses subject detail.  Upsampling non-TC crops results in digital/pixel artifacts getting bigger.

The 100-400 (or at least, my copy) is in that optical range between useless and transparent; I wouldn't use a TC at all with a 75-300, and a 2x TC on a 500mm f/4L is still a very good 1000mm f/8 lens.