Hey all I am just after some opinions regarding the 1.4x and 2x lense extenders canon offers. My bird photography gear currently consists of a Canon 80d and Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM. The reason for wanting to buy this extender is because for the past 2 years been on a self driven task to see how many different speicies i can find in SEQ and I am having extreme difficulty getting somewhat decent pictures to identify espically shorebirds which are extremely hard to get close to. The issue i am currently having is because i am required to zoom in dramatically into picutres the photo of the bird itself is too blurry and therefore i am unable to identify them. This is why i am looking at buying a extender however i dont want to spend money on something that isn't worth it.
Any opinions would be great :D
Sedie, Unless your lens is the MK2 it won't accept either of the extenders.
Samford Valley Qld.
I agree with previous comment, but maybe you just have to google or smth for another opinion) I only can recommend you visiting FixThePhoto website, there a lot of useful tips, I'm sure you'll find there something for you)
Some of your problem could be shake and using extenders cam make it worse. The more magnification you have the more sensitive your camera is to shake i.e. holding the camera still. The general rule of thumb is the minimum shutter speed to use is the inverse of the length of the lens. eg. 400mm = 400th second. If your camera has a crop sensor then you have have a 1.5 crop factor as well.
Your lens at 400mm x 1.5 crop factor becomes 600mm equivalent and then 1.5 for the extender = 900mm. Now your minimum shutter speed is 1/900th second. Your maximum equivalent aperture is probably around f8 so getting enough light into the camera to get a good well lit exposure may be an issue. You will have to use higher ISO to offset the lower light and all this can affect the quality of the image. Another cause of soft or distorted images is shooting the birds down on the ground because your depth of field is very shallow to start with and the shallow angle makes the image look distorted and out of focus. Ideally the bird should always be at your eye level so you have to lay down on the ground to achieve the same eye level, not always practicle. Shooting down also gives you terrible bokeh because the background is too close to the subject.