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Dray1027

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I'm wanting to do some bird & wild life shots & currently don't have the Mozzarella for the lens I want (Cannon EF 600mm f/4l is II), so I was wondering if I can use my 75-300mm kit lens w/ a teleconverter , & if so which one should I get?
Thanks in advance!
 
I'm wanting to do some bird & wild life shots & currently don't have the Mozzarella for the lens I want (Cannon EF 600mm f/4l is II), so I was wondering if I can use my 75-300mm kit lens w/ a teleconverter , & if so which one should I get?
Thanks in advance!

What's the street price of mozzarella and how does it translate to currency?
 
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I'm wanting to do some bird & wild life shots & currently don't have the Mozzarella for the lens I want (Cannon EF 600mm f/4l is II), so I was wondering if I can use my 75-300mm kit lens w/ a teleconverter , & if so which one should I get?
Thanks in advance!

You cannot.

Two reasons:

1) I don't know of any reputable camera stores that accept mozzarella... even if it's the fresh Buffalo mozzarella using Egyptian Water-Buffalo.

2) When you use a tele-extender, you must multiple BOTH the focal length and the focal ratio by the tele-extender factor. A 75-300mm is f/5.6 at 300mm. When you multiply that by the 2x you get f/11. So you'd have a 600mm f/11 lens. The problem in... zero cameras can focus at f/11. Only a Canon 5D III and 1D X can focus at f/8. Everything else tops out at f/5.6.

What else can you use?

A 2x tele-extender can really only be used with f/2.8 glass (or faster). It could be used with f/4 glass if you had a 5D III or 1D-X.
A 1.4x tele-extender can be used with an f/4 lens (which will then become an f/5.6 lens)

Canon's 100-400mm is about $1500 right now.
Sigma and Tamron make lenses in the 120/150-500mm zoom range which cost just shy of $1000.
I have no personal experience with these zooms.
 
I use a 1.4 TC with my Nikon 70-300 and it works quite well. As Tim stated a 2x just does not work well at all. I have one of those as well and have yet to get anything remotely useful with it.

My 1.4 is the Kenko Teleplus PRO 300 AF 1.4 DGX. The "Pro" part is important, they are MUCH better than the standard versions.
 
I think you mean cheddar.
 
Street price of good mozzarella is about $1 an ounce. So once you have about 63 pounds of mozzarella saved up, you should go trade it in for the Sigma 150-500mm Optical Stabilization lens that was linked above, which is probably your highest quality affordable option.
 
The Kenko Teleplus Pro 300 DGX 2.0 Teleconverter will work with your lens according a review here:

Kenko Teleplus PRO 300 DGX 2x AF Teleconverter PRO3002XDGXC B&H

You will of course have to manually focus. That's something that takes practice to master. Image quality will suffer as well.

Canon also makes a teleconverter however it's not compatible with your lens.

The reviews at Amazon are also very positive:

Amazon.com: Kenko 2.0X PRO 300 Teleconverter DGX for Canon EOS Digital SLRs: Camera & Photo
 
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I used my Nikon 70-300 without a TC as my main wildlife/birding lens for quite some time, and managed to do a pretty decent job.

Then I got a 1.4x TC, the Kenko Pro like the one SCraig mentions above. I hated it; I still have it, and once in a while I try it again, but I just very, very rarely get anything that I couldn't have gotten just as easily by cropping my 300mm image. For me, it seemed like a wash between adding the TC for more length but losing IQ versus keeping the better IQ and having to crop more.

THEN I found a chain of pizza stores going out of business and got all the surplus mozzarella for a steal, so I bought the Sigma 150-500. For the WIN.


My opinion? Skip the TC--do what you can with what you have. Practice your ninja skills to get closer to the birds and wildlife. There are PLENTY of good shots to be had at 300mm. Then save that TC money toward a really good, longer lens, like the Sigma I got.
 
It's been answered several times...but you can* use a 2X TC with a 70-300mm lens...but as mentioned, you'd be working with an equivalent max aperture around F11...which means that getting a decent shutter speed will be very tough unless you have LOTS of light and/or shoot at a really high ISO.

And yes, the AF will likely be useless. But you could manually focus. Normally, it's rather hard to manually focus a typical modern DSLR because the viewfinder is rather small and dim compared to high end cameras or even film SLRs. But if you have live view (and likely a tripod) then it may not be all that hard.

And of course, using a TC will steal some image quality...and a typical 70-300mm lens at F5.6 isn't great to start with.
 
And yes, the AF will likely be useless.
Losing the image stabilization (which will also happen) is almost equally as bad as this, too. So all together, adding a 2x TC on a 5.6 IS lens, means:

1) You lose image quality, possibly to the point where even under the best of circumstances, you won't be any better off than having cropped out a portion of a shorter lens (if using 3rd party TCs)
2) You lose AF and will be completely unable to shoot things like birds in flight (this is normally possible with MF, but not when you have a dim viewfinder through a dimmed lens, and no prismatic focus screen), and even still subjects will often be blurry.
3) You lose 4-5 stops of speed for still or tracked subjects. -2 for the TC optically, and -2 or 3 for losing your image stabilization.

I can't think of any situation where the above consequences would ever be worth it.
 
Perhaps you should rent a Kenko 2X TC and try it for a week or two. BTW, I don't lose stabilization on my Sigma 50-500mm when I use a Sigma 2X TC. Here are some handheld 1000mm shots taken with a Sigma doubler on the Sigma 50-500mm:

IMG_0587 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

IMG_0583 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

IMG_0590 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I only use the doubler when I have to take a far away shot. I never carry a tripod or monopod and I never crop my photos. I guess my point is that halfway decent photos can be taken with doublers. Perhaps they are not of a professional quality level but they will be satisfactory for us amateurs.
 
Solid performance on the Mozzarella comments....lol!
Looks like Ill just try to be patient & save up for the Sigma
Thanks for all the pointers guys!
 
The way of the world
$mozz.jpg
 

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