Extender question: Help Please

[joebob25]

I'm planning on buying a a lens extender because it seems to be an easy way to get more focal length out of a lens. You lose one stop with a 1.5x extender, and two stops with a 2x extender. My question is: will my 30d account for the loss in stops on it's own, or do I need to manually set my aperture one or two stops higher respectively? Thanks.

[joeseph]

Hi & welcome!
the stop or two you lose should be automaticly deducted. There are wildly varying advice given on the suitability of either, but it really comes down to "you rarely get anything for nothing"

[SkipD]

My question is: will my 30d account for the loss in stops on it's own, or do I need to manually set my aperture one or two stops higher respectively?With the Canon extenders - and others built like them - the camera will automatically "know" that the aperture range of the lens is changed. That's because of the combination of circuitry in the extender and the lens that the camera recognizes.

I believe that there are third-party extenders that do not "tell" the camera about the existence of the extender. They would essentially over-ride the camera's decision to not use autofocus when the max aperture is too small. The result could be a lot of "hunting" when attempting to autofocus. This could be bad for the lens' mechanisms.

If you are using a handheld meter instead of the camera's meter, you might run into problems with the cheap third-party extenders that don't report their existence. The situation would be like the old days of non-automated apertures. You had to open the lens up an extra stop or two depending on the power of the extender. With a Canon extender it's not a problem, except that you cannot achieve the max aperture marked on the lens of course.

[Woolburr]

Be aware that the Canon converters only work with certain lenses. Third party converters are a crap shoot....don't waste your time and money on the cheap ones...you will only be disappointed. The most versatile versions I have found so far are the Tamron SP Pro 1.4 and 2x models.