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Years ago, Barry Thornton in his book Edge of Darkness, did a test with a 35mm camera and 50mm lens, comparing sharpness at different shutter speeds hand held, with a flimsy tripod and with a sturdy one and then the sturdy one using mirror lock-up.
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The defect is that a flimsy tripod was used. Without a stable tripod, all that is proved is that the tripod was flimsy. BFD! and I do not mean "big first down" either. The proves nothing except that the tester managed to waste both time and money. Try hanging a camera from a string then start the camera swinging back and forth and see what you can get.
When I was a teenager I had a tripod with legs that were so thin they vibrated in a slight wind. The tripod lived out the rest of its life in the trash.
They couldn't have been very sharp.
A "sharp" magazine shot might look pretty miserable enlarged much. Heck, I once had a handheld night-time 8 second exposure of a car accident published in a newspaper. A wreck in its own right, but it told the story. What I've done with my own 300 real cannon-barrel, for the Pentax 6x7, is sometimes rest it on a jacket atop a car roof or fence post or boulder, rifle sniper-style, and shoot at a fast enough speed to avoid mirror slap until after the shutter curtain did its thing. That has worked out well in suitable cases. Otherwise, a really seriously built tripod is the only ticket. But on a good vibration-dampening tripod like a big wooden Ries, the greater mass of that big lens itself becomes an actual asset. On a flimsy tripod it would have exactly the opposite effect.
I have a high quality Nikon adapter for it too; and other than the sheer bulk of the whole setup, I suspect I get better results that way than I would with a dedicated Nikon 300 tele. Since only the center of the optic is used, even shooting wide open carries no qualitative penalty (with the EDIF version, that is; the regular Takumar version 300 is not as well corrected).
In my youth, I could hand-hold 1/8 with a 50mm pretty reliable, taking a deep breath and bracing my arms against my body. I can still do 1/15th with a wide lens. But there's no way I could get a sharp shot with a 300mm hand-held less I was shooting at 1/1000. And for medium format I need to double the shutter speed-to-focal length ratio nowadays, but feel more secure with at least a monopod.
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