Last night I did some shooting with my 70-200 on a tripod.  I wasn’t pleased with the sharpness with that lens when shooting hand held.  Duh!  So I set everything up and snapped a few shots.  A quick review last night and I still wasn’t satisfied with the sharpness when shooting at 200mm.  Now, I must confess, one of the problems could very well have been that I was taking 2 min exposures.  It was getting late and I wanted to shoot at f/11 or better.  There was probably enough of an evening breeze to move the subject (shrubs about 400m away). 

So this morning I tried something different.  Again, shooting at 200mm, same subjects 400m away.  But Live View is a cool feature and this morning I got around to playing with it.  Now, there’s no question it will drain the battery faster.  But…

I focused on the distant subjects using auto focus and switched to Live View.  The image was displayed on the LCD monitor.  I hit the magnification button twice.  the image on the monitor was magnified 10X.  Switching the lens to manual focus I was able to tweak the auto focus just a smidgen and get the image even sharper.  Boy, the most minute turn of the focusing ring made a difference.  I expect if someone was looking at the lens they wouldn’t notice the focus ring moving at all.  But I was able to get the last bit of focus and sharpness out of the lens.

But the proof is in the captured image file.  I uploaded the images into LR and viewed them in Loupe at 100% enlargement.  The sharpness can be summed up in one word - Wow!

Here’s what I’m talking about.  The first image is an unretouched shot from the back yard.  The subject is about 500 m away.

Click to enlarge

The next image is a detail of the first.

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