Thimble Peak Sunset, #4. Catalina Mountains, Tucson, Arizona, 2017 (at 200mm focal length)
What a behemoth of a lens, this Nikkor 200-500mm thing…definitely for car camping, car-based photo shoots, very short hikes, and NOT for hauling up to the top of a Colorado 14er. It certainly dwarfs my itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, sub-two-pound, Nikkor 70-200mm f/4, my longest tele lens up until now (and the one I used for the above image).
Not being a bird or wildlife photographer, I have never owned any photographic equipment of such honking dimensions. I am sure the Nikon pros out there with their 300mm f/2.8 (6.4 pounds) and 500mm f/4 (8.5 pounds) lenses are chuckling away at me…probably muttering something like: “That’s not a lens. THIS is a lens!”
But, I finally broke down and bought one. The reviews were excellent, the price very reasonable for what you get, and I thought it might come in handy for future projects. (Within a few days, I’ll post some sample images made from this new Nikkor brick. So far, it is living up to expectations.)
Yes, I am sure I’ll try my somewhat impatient hand at shooting a few critters here and there, but I thought it might be most useful–given my style and inclination–for landscape and urban abstracts. I have always liked the compression effect when shooting at 200mm. Well, now I have up to 500mm, and if I stick it on a DX body, or throw on a 1.4 teleconverter, I can go up to 750mm! Wow. That should give me some really extreme perspectives.
Lets see if over the long haul it really turns into a lens I use a lot.
This may also be the last time I buy any piece of photographic equipment so gangly and heavy. The other half of my photo personality has been pretty happy shooting with an iPhone or the tiny Sony RX100. As the gear gets better, smaller, and lighter (and my back gets weaker), that is surely the most likely direction I will go.
A note on the photograph above: I was obviously playing with the aforementioned compression effect which, in this case (shooting at 200mm), flattens Thimble Peak right up against Kitt Peak the latter being actually some 60+ miles farther west. One cool thing I failed to notice until I looked at the enlarged image on my computer monitor is that you can actually see the Kitt Peak observatory domes and even the inclined shaft of the solar observatory on that far ridge-top–at least I can in the full res file. (And at 36 megapixels these details are amazingly sharp!) With the above low res image, though, YMMV and it may be hard to pick out anything but the big 18-story telescope dome (which houses the Mayall 4-meter scope).
A close-up snippet of the above photo to help you out:
Observatories – Labelled, #2. Tucson, Arizona, 2017
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