I recently bought a Canon T4i with the 18-135mm lens. I am interested in shooting some shots of a pair of eagles that are 200 yards behind my house. I am unable to zoom in clearly to make them fill the screen so to speak. Any thoughts as to what I am doing wrong or is the lens just not capable of that?
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4Your lens is just not capable of that, at least not at 200 yards. You need to either get much closer or use a much longer lens. – Michael C Dec 19 '14 at 04:37
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Domyou have binoculars? How does the view through that do? Look at the power of the binoculars. If it's 8x, and the bird is still small, you'll need a telescope. Or, you can judge the X you need from that. If you decide, for example, that 6x would give enough pixels on the subject, you would get that with approx 330mm (equvilent 35mm size). With a APS-C, that's about what you're getting now. Extrapolate quantatively how much larger you magnification needs to be rather then just noting that it's too small. – JDługosz Dec 19 '14 at 06:55
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Re long lenses. You can never get a long enough birding lens (for almost all values of 'you'). Longest lowish cost will be a 500mm mirror - usually f8. Old manual heavy 500mm at variable quality - often made for something else & with an adaptor can be cheap or lowish cost. 2 x teleconverter + 300mm similarly. All of these MAY give better quality than cropped 135mm but will not satisfy. A hide is your only choice :-) – Russell McMahon Dec 19 '14 at 23:57
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No lens you'll ever be ale to afford is capable of that. To get a frame-filling shot of a 1 yard scene at a distance of 200 yards, you'd need an angle of view of about 0.3 degrees.
To get that angle of view on an APS-C sensor, you'd need a 4000mm lens. That's 5 times longer than the longest lens mass-produced by Canon.
There actually is a lens that could do it, this one:
So better start thinking about how you can get a lot closer to those eagles (and probably get at least a 300mm lens as well).
Michael Borgwardt
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