Hey guys! I'm hoping you can help me determine if my lens is damaged, or if it's just my imagination
It's the DA L 55-300mm kit lens. I've had it for a few years, and have taken good care of it EXCEPT one time where it rolled off a park bench and onto the ground. Ever since then I've suspected that it's gone soft...but it's hard to determine this for sure. It's been hard for me to get nice looking pictures at 300mm, but I don't know if this is a limitation of the lens in general, or a limitation of this particular lens. I don't have enough good pictures from before the "drop" to compare. I've heard so many great things about this lens, but it's always disappointed me. When I got the Tokina 100-300, it was a big step up (figuratively and literally - it's heavy!). Now that I've moved on and am looking to sell the kit zoom, I want to know if I'm selling damaged goods.
Couldn't think of a better way of testing than to just show you photos and see if they look normal for this lens. All these were shot with the K-5 on a tripod @ 300mm, with mirror lockup to reduce vibration as much as possible. I focused as best I could and took shots at different apertures. What you see are 100% crops of the center of the frame.
At f16, the result is not bad, but at f5.8 and f8 the sharpness is gone. This is understandable, but what makes me wonder if it's more than normal softness is that there appears to be directional blur (up/down and slightly diagonal) instead of a nice, round softness. What do you think?
f/5.8:
f/8:
f/11:
f/16:
f/22: