Hopefully I am posting this in the right forum.
I mainly focus on landscape and architecture photography using black and white film, but sometimes you just want reach and old analog equipment sometimes just doesn't cut it. I decided to purchase a long lens for my digital camera and I decided to double down on getting a looooong lens. So I bought the Fuji 150-600mm 5.6-8.0 lens for my Fuji XT-5 camera about 18 months ago... and holy molly this thing can easily help me get those pictures of lighthouses a mile of the coast.
It's a beautiful lens, but as I've come to discover, it is not easy to use for landscape. First of all image quality can really take a nose dive when punching through a lot of atmosphere, especially over water. Ao yeah the f/8 maximum aperture is technically diffraction limited, but I get atmosphere limited far sooner. But not too much you can do about without shooting in exclusively in the red wavelength. Achieving adequate dof can also be an issue. I can focus on something a mile away and the moon behind it could still be slightly out of focus. Another thing you just gotta make the best of.
My biggest pain point is actually with long exposures and vibration. I have two tripods, a Benro Mammoth carbon fiber tripod and a massive Induro CT505. Even with the rock solid Induro CT505 (which can probably hold up a house), vibration is still an issue. The shortest exposure I've been able to get a sharp shot on is probably about 1/4" after several attempts. I like to shoot during dawn and dusk hours for the lighting I like for hence why this is a problem for me. I know the dark maximum aperture of this lens isn't doing me any favors of course, but I was wondering if anyone had any secret techniques I'm missing out on? My "solution" so far is to raise the iso of the camera to a level where my minimum exposure is 1/4" and just take a lot of shots and hope one is pretty sharp. This is great and all, but sometimes working at iso 1600+ in low lighting can leave some course grit. I also leave the IS on per the instruction manual and this does seem to help vs turning it off. And of course I use the 2" timer so my hand isn't actively moving the camera.
I know there is a lot of nice de-noise software out there such as DXO Pure Raw, but when I tried that on an image with a lot of flat texture it turned the image into a watercolor painting so I'm trying to fix the issue in camera first if possible.
I mainly focus on landscape and architecture photography using black and white film, but sometimes you just want reach and old analog equipment sometimes just doesn't cut it. I decided to purchase a long lens for my digital camera and I decided to double down on getting a looooong lens. So I bought the Fuji 150-600mm 5.6-8.0 lens for my Fuji XT-5 camera about 18 months ago... and holy molly this thing can easily help me get those pictures of lighthouses a mile of the coast.
It's a beautiful lens, but as I've come to discover, it is not easy to use for landscape. First of all image quality can really take a nose dive when punching through a lot of atmosphere, especially over water. Ao yeah the f/8 maximum aperture is technically diffraction limited, but I get atmosphere limited far sooner. But not too much you can do about without shooting in exclusively in the red wavelength. Achieving adequate dof can also be an issue. I can focus on something a mile away and the moon behind it could still be slightly out of focus. Another thing you just gotta make the best of.
My biggest pain point is actually with long exposures and vibration. I have two tripods, a Benro Mammoth carbon fiber tripod and a massive Induro CT505. Even with the rock solid Induro CT505 (which can probably hold up a house), vibration is still an issue. The shortest exposure I've been able to get a sharp shot on is probably about 1/4" after several attempts. I like to shoot during dawn and dusk hours for the lighting I like for hence why this is a problem for me. I know the dark maximum aperture of this lens isn't doing me any favors of course, but I was wondering if anyone had any secret techniques I'm missing out on? My "solution" so far is to raise the iso of the camera to a level where my minimum exposure is 1/4" and just take a lot of shots and hope one is pretty sharp. This is great and all, but sometimes working at iso 1600+ in low lighting can leave some course grit. I also leave the IS on per the instruction manual and this does seem to help vs turning it off. And of course I use the 2" timer so my hand isn't actively moving the camera.
I know there is a lot of nice de-noise software out there such as DXO Pure Raw, but when I tried that on an image with a lot of flat texture it turned the image into a watercolor painting so I'm trying to fix the issue in camera first if possible.