More Praise of the Mirror

So I could not resist to try out how my ancient Sigma 600mm/f8 mirror lens does on a Nikon D800. So out I went into this year’s mediocre winter.

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The static motives one can find in the woods are tree stumps, rocks, and dead leaves. Cheers.

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All pictures here are reduced in file size by about the factor 20, thereby sharpening quite a bit. None of the some 50 pictures I took were sharp at full resolution, but the scaled images look decent.

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So this is not a miracle lens. A solid tripod and precise focussing are a must, at least when it is as gloomy outside as it is here now.

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But this was not the point of the experiment. I wanted to play with the background distortions caused by the mirror design of the lens. The ideal targets were either small or far enough away, with some sort of non-uniform background at about twice the distance to the target.

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I usually use only telephoto lenses up to 200mm, and finding small targets in the distance is a great visual training.

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