Bald Eagle (image)

[mcary]

This is the first reasonable image I've been able to capture with the combination of the 100-400 L and the 1.4x extender. I've been fairly unsatisfied with this combo (as I think I've mentioned in the past). If anyone else has had any success with it, I would love to hear what you have to say or see some examples. I didn't have the pins taped so I had to focus this one manually and it was shot wide open at an f/8.

[MARINERMAGNUM]

i'm going to be honest because i think thats what you would want. the extender is crippling that fine piece of glass. i didn't get to try one on my 100-400L before i sold it,but i have heard of similar results. instead of more mm's,i'm buying more camo

[Steve Foss]

Yes, none of the TCs do anything but harm images on the zooms. That's particularly true on the 100-400 with wide open aperture at 400mm, which is where the lens pretty much always is when you have a TC on it, because in that situation you're always looking for max reach.

I bought the 1.4 when I bought the 100-400. Sold the 1.4 a couple months later because of the image degradation. And not just at max reach/aperture, either. I was unhappy with quality even stopped down off a tripod on closeup flowers and other subjects.

On the 400 f5.6L, and any of the other prime telephotos, the 1.4 does very little harm to sharpness, while the 2 noticeably degrades images with any of the primes. I've seen, however, some very sharp and nice images with the 300 f2.8L and 2x. That lens seems to be Canon's sharpest telephoto prime.

Mike, was this image cropped at all? Sharpened? I think, sharpened or not, lassoing the eagle and keeping the lasso just inside the edge of the bird so as not to blow out the silhouette, and then applying sharpening to just the lassoed bird, would sharpen it up just a bit more without hurting it.

You know you are an excellent photographer doing fine work, Mike. We always say it's not the camera/lens, it's the imagination behind it, but sometimes it's the equipment limitations that a person can't overcome. That's what's happening here.

[mcary]

I've always been aware of the image degradation factor, even before I bought the 1.4x. I purchased it because at the time I only had the 70-200 f/4 and the extra reach was helpful. On the 70-200, the image degradation is only mildly noticeable and a person can still produce very nice images. I've found that the 70-200 is very sharp, even wide open, and thus suffers little from the extender. I was hoping when I purchased the 100-400 that I may get similar results and I may yet discover situations where it works suitably. I have one image of a great blue heron taken this last fall that turned out reasonably well even at an ISO of 800. It seems that extremely high light situations are necessary (as one would expect with that length and an f/8 minimum aperture). I was able to stop down to an f/11 for the heron image, which helped. I've more or less accepted that this combo is not going to produce great results and that I'm limited to 400mm of reach. I guess I'll just have to find a way to justify purchasing the 500mm f/4, which I've heard performs quite nicely with the 1.4x (maybe when I land that first admin job, huh Steve)