500mm mirror lens

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Originally uploaded by Les_Stockton

This is a shot of my 500mm mirror lens sitting next to a 75-300mm zoom lens. The zoom, oddly enough, is the longer lens. The mirror lens is much more compact and less conspicuous. The thing is, 500mm is harder to steady and to take good photographs with, unless you have a monopod or tripod, or else a really high shutter speed.

I bought the mirror lens because I was hoping to get around a restriction at some of the concert halls, where they see the longer lens and decide that it's "professional" equipment and wont let me in with it. They seem fine with the standard 55mm lens, and since this mirror lens is just a tiny bit longer than a standard prime lens, my hope is that I'll be able to get into concerts with it.

The lens has great power, obviously. I have an extension tube to double it's power to a 1000mm, but to-date, I have not tried that.

From what I can tell so far, the lens isn't quite as sharp as a standard lens, but this is because of the distortion due to the mirrors.

I have been spoiled to using the newer lenses that have automatic focus and automatic aperture features. This lens is a fixed aperture lens, and it's manual focus. So to use it, I'll need to manually focus and use manual settings for aperture and shutter speed. In a concert hall, I don't have much issue with this. In the old days of 35mm film, I worked manual all the time.

Click here to view a set I took with the 500mm lens.  The first portion of this set (up until and including the electric meter) was taken with the 500mm mirror lens.