The Beach, Some Waves, and a $20 Lens

A little while back I wanted to get a longer lens for my Canon F1. At the time I was replacing a 100mm 2.8 lens that had been damaged and saw a 100-300mm 5.6 for 20 bucks. I thought it would be worth a shot. I got it in the mail, messed around with it, and then it sat around until one day I remembered to bring it with me to the beach. 

The waves were particularly strong this day, rain was sprinkling, and the wind was blowing pretty hard. Coming around a bend in the road I could see good size waves crashing against the towns pier. I knew it was gonna be good. I got out of the car, loaded up my camera with Tri-x 400 and started shooting.

Because the lens is a 5.6 and it was cloudy, it ended up being too dark for my split prism screen, so I swapped it out for the brighter J style screen. I was able to shoot between 1/1000th and 1/500th at an aperture of f5.6. These are the images I got.

The lens has a push pull style zoom which is easy to use but can slip if you aren't careful. This isn't as big of a deal for framing but the change in focal length can throw it out of focus. I found myself making very tiny focus adjustments to get it back in place. This can be challenging while trying to get surfers moving.

Overall I am happy with the image quality of the lens. It is plenty sharp, at least on grainy BW film. And if you are shooting in broad daylight, the aperture is not as big of a problem. For a $20 dollar purchase, this lens exceeded my expectations. If you are doing color work, I noticed some color fringing on some slides I took at a later date. Nothing too severe. I especially like how the longer lens compressed the backgrounds nicely giving the landscapes a kind of "grand" feeling. Having a range from 100 to 300 also gives you a lot of room to play around for framing these shots. It is fun to shoot, even if it is a little challenging. 

The main point I wanted to make with this article is that you don't always have to spend a ton of money on a lens. Occasionally you find little gems like this. Getting to sit around at the beach helps too.

All of these were taken on TRI-X 400 at box speed, developed in XTOL and edited as raw tiff files.