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.
The static motives one can find in the woods are tree stumps, rocks, and dead leaves. Cheers.
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.
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.
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.
I usually use only telephoto lenses up to 200mm, and finding small targets in the distance is a great visual training.