Using a 300mm long lens #photography

I mostly use a 18 – 105 mm lens for events but for some events you need more zoom. I’m thinking about buying a 18 – 300mm long lens but they are very expensive. It will cost at least £500 and for one that goes really wide it would be more like £750. I’m using a 55 – 300mm lens now and I’ve been using it more to get some idea of how useful a 18 – 300mm would be. A long lens is very useful but you also need to be able to zoom out.

Into the crowd

You can shoot into the crowd with a long lens. This was Sunday’s St George’s day parade in West Bromwich. I was using spot focusing and shooting wide open. It doesn’t matter that much if your image is blurred. With this type of shot just get one person in focus and sharp. The rest will either be out of focus or in soft focus.

It was quite poor light with the sun breaking through now and then. I was just trying to get the flavour of the event and so once I had the crowd shots then I tried for close up shots of parts of the crowd.

Long lens

I didn’t have to run around a lot with a 300mm long lens and could take shots of anything interesting with the equivalent of a 16 X zoom. You can also crop the image when you come to editing. This image was shot at 6000 x 4000 pixels and the image you see on the internet is 1500 x 1000 and so there is plenty of scope for cropping. For a long lens the image quality is quite good.

This picture shows how narrow the depth of field will go on full zoom and how sharp the image will be. I can actually see the fishing line. The foreground and background are out of the focal plane and so out of focus.

You can crop your long lens shot to get a close up of your subject and get even more detail.

With a 55 – 300mm long lens, you can only zoom out to 55mm. If I get a 18 – 300mm lens I’ll be able to zoom out much more. You can get a better zoom on most bridge cameras but not the quality when you zoom in.