I do own a few 300mm tele-photos over the years. Started with Prakticar Carl Zeiss Jena 300/4, followed by the Contax 300/4 Tele-Tessar. Due to the size, weight and the focal length of the lens, this is a lens that most of the time is kept in the dry cabinet. I use it most of the time bring kids to zoo, or kids having some kind of school event or stage performance. Come to photographing birds, 300mm is a bit inadequate unless it is in the bird park. Also it is not easy to take sharp photos with this focal length.
In the film days, with not so good skill like me, it is not easy to take sharp photos with the 300/4 as high shutter speeds are not always possible other than days with very good sun light. High speed films are grainy and not as visually pleasing as ISO 100 film. Of course there were so many skillful wild life photographers able to take fatastic photos of bird and some of them even taken with Kodakchrome 64! Of course I am not one of them and my successful photographs on bird are so limited.
It is not until the digital edge things change a bit. Digital sensor high ISO performance is very good even to very high ISO like 1600 or 3200. ISO 400 in digital world can be considered perfect and nothing to be picky about. It is with the digital technology I manage to bring my 300/4 back to life with photos that are at least acceptable to me in terms of sharpness. Also one more thing is the printing technology. Recently my usual print shop changes their printing machine. The first few trials do surprise me that the print quality is quite good, and the print resolution seems better than the old technology and I can see some details taken by my 300/4 that I have not seen before. So I start to photograph birds again, began with easier subjects from the Singapore Jurong Bird Park.
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Rolleiflex 3003, SL2000F - SONY Alpha7R 1/2/4. A1
Carl Zeiss C/Y T* - QBM HFT - ZM T* - ZF T* - Batis T* - Otus T* - Loxia T*
Sony. Zeiss 16-35/4 T* G200600 GM100400 GM600
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