Mmmmmthinking about a mirror telephoto.

Here is one I would try because when not using it for the camera I could use it as a telescope .
At least if I were to buy a mirror lens

http://cgi.ebay.com …2%3A1234|293%3A​1|294%3A50

kohr2000 wrote in post #8339570
Here is one I would try because when not using it for the camera I could use it as a telescope .
At least if I were to buy a mirror lens

Can't you just get a t-mount for almost any telescope?

And yes I could he sell those also but I was showing an example about what I would look at if I wanted a mirror lens, I found that one while browsing around ebay and thought not bad and then saw this thread

Good as a door stop - LOL

One of the Phoenix/Samyang 500mm mirror lenses was available used for US $55, including T-mount adapter. This is the best the lens could produce.

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

my coworker bought a tamron 500mm f8 for 10$ in a flee market

The Tamron's not bad - I used to have one. I sold it when I got my 100-400L, which is far superior.

DC Fan wrote in post #8340880
One of the Phoenix/Samyang 500mm mirror lenses was available used for US $55, including T-mount adapter. This is the best the lens could produce.

From this experience, US $55 was about the right price. Good thing it wasn't being sold for full price.

Yours did better than mine. My 500mm f/8 cheapie was terrible and even tons of post processing couldn't get an image that good from it. My Sigma 600mm f/8 mirror is much better.

Many many moons ago I had an indian 600/4.5 reflector on an AE1. Provided I moved the toothpick to correct for DOF/focus gradient, the resultant image was pretty good. Maybe I got a good one. I seem to recall a headshot at 200 metres.

I could be wrong, but I was pretty happy with the IQ and bokeh.

C:\>

I think I can show you better examples if you'll go to this link:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=723050

But if you do, you'll see that you are looking a higher quality mirror lens, made to Leitz standards by Minolta. I use an adapter to mount it, and it is possible to have focus confirmation with some of the Chinese-mad adapters (although I think the results are flaky).

Well the Russian Rubinar 1000mm mirror lens I used, I was able to get pretty darn good images, never mind the manually intensive nature of getting these shots:

Again the review post I did is here: https://photography-on-the.net …=537136&highlig​ht=rubinar

First shot shows what I was going for, the 2nd is with the mirror lens.

Wow those shots are not half bad at all , I have a Phoenix 500mm Mirror that just sits in a cupboard I tried it once and got nothing resembling a good shot .

Any tips on how to use this thing ? The one that I have belongs to a friend who brought it gave up and dumped it by me .


David

Camera shake is a big problem since the lens is very light and the focal length very long. If you use a tripod, use mirror lock-up and a remote release and try holding your hand over the top of the camera to damp vibrations. Using a monopod works quite well with mirror lenses. Keep shutter speeds high, faster than 1/1000s unless you have things very well braced. The lens is very light, pressing the shutter button will wiggle too much. High ISOs on sunny days are generally needed.

Focus very carefully. Keep practicing. Watch very carefully in the viewfinder while you focus to see the plane of best focus moving back and forth over your subject to set the focus distance. Don't just look for sharpness changing, try to see the plane of focus and place it where you want. Depth of field is very shallow even at large distances. Make sure that the dioptre setting of the viewfinder is set correctly.

To give the illusion of sharpness, try to get good light and side lighting to help bring up the surface texture of the subject.

Use a lens hood as Catadioptric lenses wash out even worse than their already low contrast behavior.

As usual using raw gives you more to work with. There should be almost no chromatic aberration from your mirror lens but there may be some light fall-off to the corners especially with full frame. You can correct this in the raw converter or later in photoshop.

In post processing bring up the black point, tweak the exposure and adjust the tone curve to bring up the midrange contrast a little. Bring up the colour saturation to taste. Then resize down and sharpen appropriate to how much blur remains on the sharpest part of the photo. Don't sharpen the whole image. Remove sharpening for all of the out of focus parts to avoid bringing up the noise from using high ISOs and to avoid making the bokeh worse. Finally consider a bit of extra blur for the out of focus parts if you don't like how they were rendered.

Adjust your expectations too. Don't expect huge blow-ups and deep crops to look great. Under optimal conditions and good processing an acceptable, moderate sized, picture can be created with some effort.

Thank you for the info I will give it a try again , I wont expect much but I am sure I will have fun ............... Or pull what's left of my hair out

I'm not saying these lenses don't have limitations, but one thing to bear in mind when using extra-long focal lengths is that you're often looking at very distant subjects, which means looking through much more air than you may be accustomed to. At short ranges this is normally ignored completely, but over long distances softness and low contrast can be largely due to the atmosphere. I noticed at a recent motorsport event that even at 400mm (on an APS-C body) some shots that at first looked a little soft or out-of-focus, were actually just suffering from a mild bit of "heat haze" spoiling the sharpness.