A Beautiful day in the Neighborhood

We ventured over to Wilde Lake today for some shooting — twice, actually. I’m still having focus issues, mostly with the 70-200mm lens, and I wanted to run some tests. And, it was a lovely day and we didn’t want to be cooped up in the house for all of it.

The tests were pretty inconclusive — and fairly unscientific. For our first trip over, I shot with my 70-200 on my 40D body, and the second trip, I used Donna’s lens on my 40D body. The results pretty much indicated that, as long as things aren’t terribly far away, focus is really good. The picture of the Black Crowned Night Heron (above, left) was taken with Donna’s lens and my 2X converted. I was, maybe, 20 feet from the bird. Even though the original was pretty grossly under-exposed, the shot cleaned up quite nicely. And, it’s super sharp.

Distant subjects, like these two shots of a Great Blue Heron in flight, are a different story. The one on the left was taken this morning, with my lens. The one on the right, was this afternoon with Donna’s lens, and both had the 2X converter involved.

My next test will be to see if maybe the problem is in the body. I’ll try one of the lenses on an XTi body and/or Donna’s 40D. Or, maybe it’s just me…

See more pictures on my Flickr stream.

The issue appears to be that the camera is "front focusing," meaning that the point where the camera actually focuses is a few inches closer than the subject. For this picture, I focused on the male duck’s head (the mail is the one with the dark green head). But, examination of the image shows the sharpest point of focus to be in the grass in front of the two ducks.

I’m hoping that this doesn’t mean that my camera needs to take a trip to Canon for work. There is a firmware upgrade that was just released, and I’m going to try installing that to see if there’s any improvement at all. Focus issues are not listed in the fixes (though corrections to the Norwegian language menus are!), but there may be something in there that will help. I doubt it will hurt anything.