500 mm Reflex

 So this is the accidentally neat shot I took the other day. I was trying to get some shots of chickadees with my 500mm reflex (aka mirror) lens. Its a really cool lens, though it has a rather narrow scope of use. Instead of using a lot of glass and being really long to get the increased focal length, it uses two mirrors. One at the back of the lens close to the camera body facing your subject which bounces the light to the other, smaller mirror towards the front end of the lens that faces back into the camera. Because of this second mirror, the lens has some odd side effects. First, its has to be a fixed focal length (you can't zoom in and out, just focus), second, its a fixed aperture (f 8.0), and lastly, its manual focus. However, that front mirror also turns all the out of focus highlights into blurry doughnut rings - which you can just see in the above photo on the right side of the image. I think they are kind of cool, but I hear its kind of a love it or hate it aspect of reflex lenses. Anyways, an aperture of f 8.0 doesn't let a lot of light in the camera so you have to make do with ISO adjustments and slower shutter speeds. Of course then you either have to hold the camera really still or deal with ISO grain. My new D300 is better on the grain side of things than my old D200 but its still not what you could get with the new cameras (but they cost a lot!). So I usually try to keep the ISO under 1000 and then use the fastest shutter I can. This shot is of the power line to my house and the cable it's wrapped around. I was trying to make sure my exposure and focus would be adequate when a chickadee landed, and surprised myself with this shot. The trees behind it were dark enough to make the background black, and the way details on the cable pop just makes it cool. More of an artsy photo of the everyday I suppose.

 This one I took yesterday from my back porch across the yard with the same lens. I've cropped it some, and fiddled with the highlights/shadows/sharpening in Picasa. I find that without a really good brace its hard to get a sharp image with this lens. It does have a lot more reach than my auto-focus enabled 70-300 lens though so I haul it out on special occasions... like the next two photos below

The best two shots of an adult female (I think) goshawk that flew through my yard after I filled up the bird feeder and landed at the top of this tree way off in the neighbour's yard. I only knew it was a raptor when it landed, and actually had to use the lens like binoculars to find the bird on the tree top when I came back out with my camera. I walked through the field between us and the neighbours house, using different bits of the horse fence to help steady the shots. I've included them here because the subject matter is cool and they were taken with the same lens as the others. They aren't really very good images at full size - between trying to get the focus right without a split circle viewfinder like in the old film cameras, the high ISO needed, and that the hawk was still small in the frame, they are pretty grainy and not print quality. That said, you can see some of the details on the grey feathers on her wings and can easily identify the species, so they are kind of neat. I cropped both of these and adjusted the highlights/shadows and sharpness in Picasa.