Moving Pictures

I have only visited Jonathan Dickinson State Park once before to kayak up the river. A rivier loaded with alligators. But that's another story. Take a close look at the first photo. I took this with my Nikon Coolpix S 3000. A tiny pocket camera I could hide in one hand and the one I thought I destroyed some years ago. There was a tiny scratch on the lens. After reading on the internet about rubbing it with a Q-Tip and a little petroleum jelly it seems to have cleared up the annoying spot on the top left corner. Now look even closer at the two odd tree tops just above the tree line near the middle. Switching to my Nikon D70 with the Vivitar 500mm F/8.0 I can get a little closer while standing in the exact same spot. Here is the empty nest from the first shot. I could not even see it with the naked eye. What a great setup for shooting wildlife.... if there had been any wildlife. Wait!! Is that a Gator!! I waited quite a while for this guy to move. I started to get ...

I thought I would finish up shooting with this really long lens by trying to squeeze the full two and a half miles of the Hollywood Beach Broadwalk into one shot. I saw it done very well once by a friend of mine about 10 years ago. Since then the light poles have been changed, repaired, and reworked several times. Pretty much every time I thought about shooting it there was mismatched lighting, construction, or bad weather. When I finally got there on just the right day, my biggest lens was just not enough. The 2x doubler I had just made matters worse and a shaky tripod made for a frustrating day. That was about 3 years ago. On this day I took my oldest working camera - Nikon D70, Cheapest lens - Vivitar Series 1 500mm F/8.0, and my $20.00 tripod set very low to the ground. I shot in the morning at Anne Kolb in highly overcast conditions. When I staked my claim on a bench at the end of the Broadwalk, the light could not have been brighter. My drive home was met with torrential rain...

I have found one of the problems shooting with this lens is you need a lot of space. That is a lot of  space between the camera and what you are shooting at. It will not focus closer than about 40 feet. I've never really had this problem before but it also needs a lot of distance to really stretch it out. Before you move on, look at the last photo. From the 4 story observation tower at Anne Kolb, this lens has some serious reach. Even on a very overcast day. The red circle is the distance I was shooting the buildings at. Quite a bit outside the nature center. They are not the sharpest but a bit more light and a little less wind would have made a difference.

When researching this lens (briefly) I found no real reviews. Just some comments on Amazon.com ranging from "I've had it a week and it was exactly what I expected" to "I'm sending it back - my camera does not recognise it". At $130.00 it was by far the cheapest camera accessory I've bought in a long time. I had a specific purpose in purchasing it. To learn how to use a camera. That may seem funny as I have over 100,000 shots on my computer, 13,000+ on Flickr with 2,000,000+ hits. I have a lot of people fooled. I have always relied heavily on the auto settings of my various cameras. Not only did I buy this lens fully knowing it was completely manual - it came with a 2X doubler. I had to take that off after the first day as a 1,000mm lens is way too much to start off with. I happen to be using a Nikon D70 but no matter the camera, it will only shoot with this lens in Manual mode. Focus is a lot more challenging than you might expect. Especially as...