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.
Click to enlarge
I think I can live with that.
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