I have a Vivitar 500mm Mirror Lens f/8.0 MF series 1 lens that I received as a gift a while back, but I never got around to using it because I was learning and used mostly 50mm or 55-250 Canon lenses.
What kind of photography was this lens intended for?
Since it has so much zoom I thought I could use it to photograph things from far, so I tried it today at a field while I was on a cliff I was photographing the tractors, but I had a difficult time with it. I used a tripod and used the LCD screen to zoom in and make sure I got a good focus, but I was never able to get it focused, everything looked soft, is this normal for this lens?
Also, I adjusted my settings to what I thought suitable for the lighting and location, and those settings worked fine with my 55-250 lens, but on this Vivitar lens when I took the photographs and looked back at them, they were way blown out (very very bright, and soft). I had to use ISO 2000, and 1-640sec to get the brightness down, but it was still a tad bit bright. I took care of it in DPP as best I could, but the whole quality of the image overall is not good.
The photos look as if I used a point and shoot and zoomed in all the way to where it loses detail and focus. But I focused it as much as it was possible, a tiny bit to the left or right was too blurry, and I haven't had this problem with any of the other lenses.