Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 EX OS

Jelloneck that's nice work with the Cooper's hawk and baseball. Great job with the wedding Talley! Gabe, you really are a bird whisperer
Took some Red-tail hawk photos but they aren't on the computer yet. These are uncropped with the bare lens and 65mm of extension tubes. EXIF is intact.

A copperhead blending in

Just got my copy for a good price. Unfortunately, it won't focus at infinity when at 300mm, so I'll have to send it in somewhere and hopefully get that corrected. However, short of inifinity, it does focus quite quickly!

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Sport model with Sigma 2x TC

Handheld f5.6 1/2000 ISO 800

At this shutter speed, I should have turned off the OS.

Blue Hour Moon

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Nice handheld moon M_Six

A few birds with the tc2001 2x teleconverter. The baseball images were just the lens no tc.

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Last shot is my favorite Jelloneck. Had the 2x TC on Easter morning when I took the following. No noise reduction, sharpening, or color adjustments. Exif intact.

Thanks, it's one of my favorites from the day.

Very cool...is that a sunrise or sunset?

Sunrise

Yeah, I really like it too!!

Beautiful Lorikeet John! I wish I could head back that way. Australia is amazing.

No photos to share, just some info on T-Cons and bodies.

I decided to try the 120-300mm with the Canon 2X for 600mm @ f/5.6
I was initially shooting with the 7D2

The results came out pretty good. Definitely useable, some very sharp. AF was not very confident, but again useable. It's a combo I would try in the field if the situation demanded.

This caused to me get a little crazy and try something stupid. Arguably, the lens should AF with any body capable of f/8 AF with BOTH the 2X and 1.4 mounted.
It just so happens that I have 3 bodies that will do that, so I decided to stack them and see how we fared.

The resulting optic is 840mm at the long end f/8 Wide open.

On all three bodies the second T-Con was ignored by exif, it was "non reporting" so in camera the aperture would report as large as f/5.6, but it was not really there. Exif still shows a 600mm. Once I stopped down to f/11 that of course showed in the exif correctly.

Since cameras could not detect that it was f/8 they did not limit me to center AF point only.

The 7D2 did badly. AF would not settle. I tried limiting to center AF point only but this made no difference. It tried, but it just was unusably erratic.
This was a failure IMHO with the far too erratic AF that would no lock.

Next was the 1D4 which I assumed would be the best, because hey, may be old, but so is the lens and T-Cons and well, it's a 1D!

In fact, I saw little to no improvement over the 7D2. Same jittery AF jumping.

Last up, the 5D3.
Surprise surprise, the 5D3 was actually useable! The images were most sharply in focus, and much less jumping around to get there.

I doubt I'd ever stack t-cons with this lens in the field, but with the 5D3 I would consider it a workable solution.

As for the lens itself, I feel that it performed remarkably well optically. Some of the images ended up with a bit of a washed out look, but on the whole stopped down to f/11 (from an actual f/8ish wide open) the image quality was not only useable, but quite good. Much better than I had expected from t-con stacked on a zoom. Manual focus could provide sharp results with all three cameras..

Good to see you're experimenting with the lens

I think I only used stacked TCs with that lens a couple times, even though my 70D in live view focused relatively fast and with no hiccups with the 2x + 1.4x attached. I also stacked 2 2x TCs to shoot the moon and that worked pretty well.

But mostly I was using it it with either the 2x (I'd say 70% of the time) or the 1.4x (about 20% of the time). I rarely used just the bare lens. Heck, I even tried once without a body, but the results were poor (just kidding of course)

For my own use, I am afraid to say that I already have the long end covered rather well, so I got this lens for use mostly bare, when light is scarce and speed is required. It will be used as a Canon 300mm f/2.8 prime would be used by someone that also has the 500mm or 600mm, with the added advantage of the zoom.

That said, it was cool to see how it takes the T-cons, and I can certainly see the times where 240-600mm zoom would come in very handy. I suspect this lens will join me if I get the chance for another trip to Africa. Loved the 500mm for about 85% of the time, wished it could zoom out the other 15%!

first attempt at testing it with the peregrines i shoot...i dropped my hood over a cliff, and i think it led to some more ghosting than i'm used to...but i'm still hopeful it will serve me well...with the 2X...landscape shots are bare...side note, anyone with the sport version able to tell me if a magnet sticks to the hood(i don't expect it to) but with the hood backordered, i'm contemplating a rescue mission

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