Originally posted by Racer X 69 Please forgive my correction, but that isn’t a calf.
It is a cow, an adult female. See the udder?
A calf is what cows give birth to.
All good advice, thanks. I suppose it's obvious by now that my total experience with seriously tele-photo lenses is limited to about six hours of fiddling. One thing's clear, though, this is going to have to be a "sniper" camera/lens - an 11 lb. lens on top of a K-1 w/battery grip on top of a tripod beefy enough to hold all that up in a strong wind - no way I'm going on extended hikes looking for the birds along the trail - the birds are going to have to come to me. Once I get set up, I ain't movin'.
The one in the picture isn't the calf I had in mind, however - I think that was his mom - I took a lot of cattle pictures that day.
Clearly, it's going to take more practice. (No one noticed that I used the plural form, "calves" rather than the possessive, "calf's", though, or they were too polite to bring it up.) As to the depth of field thing, it seems to me that it's not just the aperture that's controlling it, it's the combination of aperture and focal length. I had pictures where, at f/5.6, there was a space of about two feet or so that was in focus, and it wasn't where I'd told the autofocus button to look at.
Here's another example of the distances involved: the silo in the picture OF the silo is the same one located just to the left of the center of the wider-angle picture (24-70 set to 26mm). And the ridge-top picture posted earlier shows the crest of the right-most ridge, though a bit off to the right. The two lenses distort the distance in opposite ways, of course, but you get the drift, I reckon.
All criticism and advice is welcome, whether I accept it or not will be my own problem. And do be blunt; I am bad at interpreting polite speech. Thanks, again.
Last edited by Unregistered User; 02-18-2019 at 03:21 PM.