Extension tube or longer lens?

[james_tigerwoods]

I took a nice (in my opinion) photo of the moon last night @ 200mm and I like it... Now I'm toying with the idea of getting a 55-300 to replace my 55-200 - however, a friend of mine has suggested an extension tube instead.

Is this a good idea - bearing in mind that my lenses are AF-S and I'd want to get something that works with that. Or should I just get the 55-300 and enjoy an uncomplicated extra 100mm?

Cheers

JTW

[dibbly dobbler]

JTW - not meaning to be pedantic but is it not an 'extender' rather than an 'extension tube' you want ? The latter is used to allow you to get closer for macro work, the former gives more reach

[Simpo Two]

'Teleconverter'. It will increase the focal length but loses aperture and adds more glass for extra CA on those sharply contrasting moon edges

The 300mm would be better but for the extra 33% it gives you, you could probably just crop the 200mm image and nobody would know the difference.

[jimmy156]

To be honest I wouldn't have thought that even 300mm would be long enough for moon shots.

I was shooting the moon last night at 400mm and i was amazed at how much i had to crop to get a decent sized moon in the shot. You may also notice that "cheaper" telephoto lenses tend not to be at there sharpest when focussed near infinity, mine certainly isn't!

[james_tigerwoods]

I ended up cropping (and a little more editing besides) to get this:



Wouldn't the extra 100mm make much difference?

ETA - ISO 200, 1/1250, f5.6, 200mm

[Colin RedGriff]

I took this last night at 400mm with a 1.4 teleconvertor on a Canon 50d (1.6 crop). I thats a 560 focal length before you take the crop factor into account, even then I had to crop it down to about half the size.

If you want to get serious then probably a telesope with a camera adaptor is the way to go, otherwise I would stick with a good quality lens', work on getting a sharp image and crop it.


120307_MG_0317 by Colin RedGriff, on Flickr

[jimmy156]

To give you an idea of what 400mm would give you;

This is the edited shot:


2012-03-07 by jimmyb156, on Flickr

This is the original;


IMG_7047_2 by jimmyb156, on Flickr