Originally posted by Femto1969 Thanks for that information!!
A few questions:
Do you use your 200mm for landscapes? Its minimum aperture is f/45 iirc. I'm hoping that I can use it for landscapes in Seattle of islands and mountains and such.
Can you explain the "punching in" aspect of the extension tubes on the 105?
And for those landscape shots with close focusing, where do you focus your lens to get everything sharp? Right on the near object? In the background? Somewhere in between? What aperture do you use?
Thanks!!
I only shoot landscape and use my 200 much more than I thought I would. I am a little more interested in simplifying rather than "showing it all" so depending on your shooting style it might not be as much use to some. Below are 4 different examples of situations in which I used a 200mm.
This is a close up of a section of rocks of rocks about 30x40 inches if I remember correctly. I might have been able to get closer with a shorter lens but I wanted the flattening or compressing effect of a longer focal length. You can see I lost focus in the top as the rocks were positioned farther away from me in the top of the frame and closer in the foreground.
Here is a medium shot. The pool of water in this image is about 15x30 feet. I wanted to single out this water feature within the negative space of snow from its surroundings of a busy forrest. I stood slightly above the water feature to try and shoot straight across at it, Im probably standing 40 ish feet back from the nearest creek edge.
Here is a "near/far" type medium wide image. As you can see there are 2 foreground branches at the top of the frame that are soft due to them being infront of my foreground focus point (the rocks at the bottom of the frame). If I was to shoot this again I'd sacrifice background sharpness vs foreground since the slightly out of focus far background would read as mist anyway. Live and you learn.
Here is a wide image. I have shot a decent amount of wide images with the 200mm knowing im going to crop into 6x12. I know exactly where I was standing for this image and just google earth'ed it and its almost 6mi to the half lit half dark hill in the mid ground.
I shoot using hyper-focal technique, so I'm focusing on the nearest object I want in focus. For example in the 3rd image, I focused on the rocks in the foreground check the DoF scale on my lens and the infinity sign was around f22 telling me that everything from my near focus to infinity would be sharp if I shot at f22. As mentioned above about the branches, you can at times err slightly on the side of losing focus at infinity since far distances in some situations will not be super sharp due to atmosphere or in that images case fog/mist. I shoot 90% of my images at f16/16.5 on the other lenses or F/22 on the 200.
Also to clarify, sorry, by punching in I just was referring to getting closer. The extension rings give you the ability to focus the lens nearer to the subject. I can agree with what was said about it possibly being to close for traditional portraiture but depending on your style/what you are doing it can be a great buy. I've seen a decent amount of people wishing the 105 focused a bit closer so I threw in that statement as its something I have seen people shooting both landscape and portraiture express interest in.