Do these look right?

Phal

Phal

Phal

Soldato
Joined
19 Jul 2004
Posts
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Location
Shoreham by Sea
Bought a second hand 100-400mm L and it arrived today so I went out after work and took some shots with it. Now maybe I've been spoilt by the sharpness of my 70-200 F4L but these look weirdly soft.

I've uploaded a selection of the test shots and picked the sharpest ones I could find to try to rule out any issues on my part! I took about 200-300 shots so the sharpest ones should be about as good as they get? :P

The majority are taken wide open at 400mm since that's pretty much what the lens is supposed to do. The 100mm shot of the boat looks pretty good annoyingly but I'm not sure about the others? Thoughts?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phal44/sets/72157633351794438/with/8681842000/
 
Which ones in particular look like that? Do the sharper ones at least look like you'd expect?

Guess I'll try to get some manually focused test shots tomorrow to see how those look.
 
Stopping it down a tad might help, as lots of lenses (more so zooms) aren't always sharpest at max apertures.
Also, where you using the centre focus point, or matrix?
 
Phal said:
Bought a second hand 100-400mm L and it arrived today so I went out after work and took some shots with it. Now maybe I've been spoilt by the sharpness of my 70-200 F4L but these look weirdly soft.

I've uploaded a selection of the test shots and picked the sharpest ones I could find to try to rule out any issues on my part! I took about 200-300 shots so the sharpest ones should be about as good as they get? :P

The majority are taken wide open at 400mm since that's pretty much what the lens is supposed to do. The 100mm shot of the boat looks pretty good annoyingly but I'm not sure about the others? Thoughts?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phal44/sets/72157633351794438/with/8681842000/
Click to expand...


Are you using a tripod, with mirror lockup, remote release, using live view focusing. Unless you test under reasonable circumstances then it is hard to judge. Could be focus issues, camera movement, vibration.

400mm requires much better technique than a 200mm lens. Don't expect to handhold such a lens easily and get good results.
 
Centre point was used for any subjects on the ground so I could target better but all points were used for any shots of stuff flying to make it easier to get AF on target.

All shots were taken with the tripod mounted but often with the legs folded in so it's basically a monopod so there is a chance of movement. A few of the shots were stopped down a bit but only up to F7.1 so perhaps not far enough to make a difference.

I realise those aren't perfect test conditions which is why I picked the best ones out of a large number of shots. I'm just curious whether people think these are reasonable? I'm trying to manage my expectations so if they look ok considering the conditions then that's ok. As you've mentioned, 400mm is different to 200mm so perhaps it's just a learning curve issue :)
 
I'd have thought F7.1 would be enough & shooting at fairly high SS would eliminate motion blur (certainly on the static shots) + being braced, but I haven't used the lens so have nothing to compare it with, sorry.
 
I would try and do some controlled tests before jumping to conclusions. It could be something like a lens element popped out of alignment or a calibration error on the lens or camera but it is hard to tell from those photos what the case is.



Also was IS switched on? If you have IS/VR switched on for shutter speeds faster than around 1/500th to 1/800th of a second then it can cause blurring and loss of detail.
It should always be switched off unless needed.
 

Blackbird 2 by Andy2580, on Flickr
taken at 1/320th second, iso 400, 400mm and f/5.6 on a Canon 5D Mk III


Robin by Andy2580, on Flickr

taken at 1/500th second ISO 200 400mm and f/5.6 on a Canon 50D

They're a couple of examples of what you can expect when things go right :)

Your shutter speeds look fairly ok. The shots do however look a little soft.

Have you got a filter on the front of the lens? If so take it off and see if there is an improvement.

Have you got the manual for the lens? If you haven't it can be found at

http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/7/0300003647/01/ef100-400f45-56lisusm-en.pdf

Make sure that you set the focusing distance switch appropriately i.e 1.8m to infinity or 6.5m to infinity - the autofocusing speed can be shorter as a result (page 6 of the manual)

Make sure you have Image stabilisation on when using it hand held.

The IS has two modes, mode 1 which corrects vibrations in all directions and is usually used for static objects, whilst mode 2 will iron out vibrations if you are panning in a horizontal plane or in a vertical plane. Make sure you have the correct mode switched on.

I would try some static shots mounted on a tripod if I were you. If you do make sure that the IS is turned off, since it can cause problems. - edit I've just seen that you did have the camera and lens mounted to a tripod, this might be the cause of the problem, the IS in this lens can go into a 'feedback' loop and actually induce shake.

DP is right, you need good technique with this lens, but when you get it right it is worth it.
 
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D.P. said:
Also was IS switched on? If you have IS/VR switched on for shutter speeds faster than around 1/500th to 1/800th of a second then it can cause blurring and loss of detail.
It should always be switched off unless needed.
Click to expand...


I knew IS could have an effect on the quality (something I've observed with my 18-135mm kit lens) but I never knew it was related to shutter speeds rather than just IS in general! Learnt something so thanks :)

I was looking through the EXIF details to see if it stated whether IS was on or off because I did turn IS off for some cases as a test but don't really remember which ones now :/ I just took a few quick test shots in my room and even at longer exposures of something like 4-5 seconds to get 100 ISO shots I still notice a fairly big difference with IS on or off.

Thanks for the link to the manual, I'll have a read. I knew there was a difference in the IS modes but couldn't remember which was which so I left it on mode 2 when it was on. Will have to do more tests with mode 1 and with it off to get a proper feel of what it's like with subjects further away than a few meters in my room.


No filters to remove, just the lens with the hood. Thanks for the input so far guys, tis much appreciated :)
 
Went and took a few more test shots after work although the weather was a bit sketchy and I didn't stay out long.

The test shots without IS definitely seem better but I noticed something weird when taking my test shots with liveview enabled. With IS disabled the camera does autofocus ok without any issue but when it does liveview autofocus with IS on it's almost as if the lens moves around slowly. It's not like a shake, it's a slow gradual move... It's weird! I'll see if I can get video or something.
 
You do NOt state which camera it was attached to, or whether you took Jpg or Raw, or whether you used photoshop, or if you did a sharpening in photoshop or whatever progy you used. Would Help a lot.
 
RussD said:
You do NOt state which camera it was attached to, or whether you took Jpg or Raw, or whether you used photoshop, or if you did a sharpening in photoshop or whatever progy you used. Would Help a lot.
Click to expand...

It's in the Exif data on Flickr :)
 
What he said :P Just for simplicity - 650d and it was shot to RAW and exported through Lightroom 4.3

There was no processing applied but I did notice that I'd accidentally left a 3MB size limit on my first test images that were exported! Doh

Hopefully the weather will stay decent today so I can give it a proper run around and see what kind of shots I get out of it.
 
Ok, well I went out for a walkabout earlier and took a bunch of new test shots with the 100-400mm with IS off and I've uploaded a bunch of them. I've uploaded 5 or more of each subject just to show that they seem fairly consistent. None of these have been cropped or processed in any way and I've uploaded the full res images. They were all taken on my tripod whilst using the centre point for focus.

In the case of the first bird (no idea what it's called) the focus seems to have ended up somewhere a little behind the bird even. The AF was in servo mode so I would have expected it to change a little between shots but it seems fairly consistently behind the bird.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phal44/sets/72157633351794438/


137 by Phal44, on Flickr


142 by Phal44, on Flickr


123 by Phal44, on Flickr


222 by Phal44, on Flickr
 
I was having some issues with soft images from this lens, but then followed a micro focus adjustment tutorial and I think it's much sharper now.

I tried the instructions in first post here:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/58042-AF-microadjustment-tricks

At 400mm I had a sticker stuck on a chair for doing my tests, before the MFA I couldn't see the little ink dots that made the image on the sticker, but viewing it in real time with just +1 adjustment the ink dots snapped into perfect focus.

Using the lens since I've done this seems to make it much sweeter on the focus for me.
 
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Phal said:
Went and took a few more test shots after work although the weather was a bit sketchy and I didn't stay out long.

The test shots without IS definitely seem better but I noticed something weird when taking my test shots with liveview enabled. With IS disabled the camera does autofocus ok without any issue but when it does liveview autofocus with IS on it's almost as if the lens moves around slowly. It's not like a shake, it's a slow gradual move... It's weird! I'll see if I can get video or something.
Click to expand...

Im not sure if Im understanding correctly or not Phal, but are many of your tests shots being taken with liveview? if so; the camera autofocuses in a completely different (ie, slower and less effective) way when using liveview compared to using the viewfinder and this could be the cause of your concern...
 
Colourjam said:
I was having some issues with soft images from this lens, but then followed a micro focus adjustment tutorial and I think it's much sharper now.

I tried the instructions in first post here:
http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php/58042-AF-microadjustment-tricks

At 400mm I had a sticker stuck on a chair for doing my tests, before the MFA I couldn't see the little ink dots that made the image on the sticker, but viewing it in real time with just +1 adjustment the ink dots snapped into perfect focus.

Using the lens since I've done this seems to make it much sweeter on the focus for me.
Click to expand...


Ta, will have a read of that :)


The images I've taken in liveview are just of stationary items like buildings/trees etc. These were just to test if I could get a sharp image with manual focus in case AF was off for any reason. I'd like to think that in the 5-600 images I've taken so far with the lens I would have had a few satisfactory images but I have to say those are faw and few between! Liveview doesn't have a chance in hell of focusing on anything moving at any real pace. It could be that I'm just expecting too much from it having used my 70-200mm F4L which is awesomely sharp :/

I've emailed a Canon repair centre to see how much it might cost to have it checked for problems and or calibrated. I know a lot of people don't seem to have much luck with that kind of thing but if this is just how the lens is, I'd rather know for sure before I sell it on.

The AF is a lot noisier when I have IS on so I've tried searching to see if that's a common issue but haven't really found much. Hopefully it's not too expensive to get checked out.
 
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Phal said:
The AF is a lot noisier when I have IS on so I've tried searching to see if that's a common issue but haven't really found much. Hopefully it's not too expensive to get checked out.
Click to expand...
The noise you can hear will be the IS system kicking in.
 
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