Bower 500mm f/8 manual focus

[RLL39]

Anyone have any experience or opinions about this lens? Wanted to try it with a t6

[ScottyP]

Be sure not to get one of the "mirror lenses".  They are shorter but they give horrible donut bokeh on the out of focus highlights. 

[ScottyP]

Like this....

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=980&bih=643&q=mirror+lens+donu...

[RLL39]

Oh yeah ugh. I was just researching lenses and was told the soligor 400mm would be good with the t6 and I ran upon the bower. Any other good affordable lenses out there? I don't mind manual. I'm a beginner so it would be good practice.

[Waddizzle]

The lens, and all its' similarly designed cousins, can be difficult to achieve critical focus.  I have a Vivitar, and the focus ring only turns somewhere around 1/4 of a full revolution.  Focusing is hit or miss, and you wind up taking a few test shots before you can feel that you have achieved good focus.

If you mount it on a tripod, which is almost a must, you will need a pretty robust tripod/head combo to suppress the vibrations associated with turning the focus ring.  But, even a good tripod cannot make up for the vibrations transmitted through the tripod foot, which doesn't have a tight enough fit ti suppress all vibrations.

The preset aperture means that you will need to use it under conditions that are well lit.  Fortunately, photographing the Moon meets that definition.  You should be able to get detailed photos of the Moon, but they will likely be lacking tack sharp focus.

[ScottyP]

I had never heard of the soligor lenses before Ernie suggested one for you. I glanced at a review and for the price it seems at least worth reading more. 

Bird photography is really expensive to do well. I don't really do it much, partly for that reason, but in playing around with it you immediately notice how small they are. A 250mm lens on a 1.6x crop won't even get you a bird bigger than a speck even out on your back lawn. Birders usually use 600mm or more. 

Birds are are also fast when flying. "BIF" bird in flight shots therefore also need fast autofocus. I don't know if there is a masochistic subculture of extreme challenge-seeking photographers that do this with manual focus or not. 😉

My bird shots involve luring subjects to my back porch with a bird feeder. Covering my window with newspaper and shooting through a tiny hole I was able to get some nice shots with a 70-200mm lens of birds about 10-12 feet away.  Were I to do it again I'd hang a dead branch or two around the feeder to get some shots without my bird feeder in it. Get a nice blue sky background behind a bird on your dead branch and you can tell everyone you tracked the little guy down by his song while on a hike with your $20,000.00 600mm lens. 🙂

[RobertTheFat]

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@Waddizzle wrote:

... 

The preset aperture means that you will need to use it under conditions that are well lit.  Fortunately, photographing the Moon meets that definition.  You should be able to get detailed photos of the Moon, but they will likely be lacking tack sharp focus.

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Has the meaning of "preset" changed in recent years? In the early days of SLRs, when you set the aperture, the leaves moved, and you found yourself looking at an image that could be pretty dim, depending on what aperture you had set. You could focus fully open, but you had to remember to stop the lens down before you pressed the shutter button. Then somebody invented a "preset" lens, on which you could set the aperture ahead of time, but it didn't actually stop down until you pressed the shutter button. By that definition, virtually all DSLR lenses in common use today are preset lenses. Early preset lenses stayed stopped down after you took the shot. In a later refinement, the "automatic" lens, the leaves reverted to fully open after the shot.

But in the passage quoted above, you seem to be using the term "preset" to refer to the original type of lens, in which setting the aperture is fully manual. I don't think you're as old as I am (almost 79). But I believe you are a member in good standing of this forum's geezer class; so I assume you remember some of those early days. And you've been continuously in the game longer than I have, so you may be more up on current nomenclature than I am. So just what is the current meaning of "preset"?

BTW, preset lenses were the reason that many early SLRs had the shutter button on the front, rather than on top. A tab extending from the lens fit over the shutter button. It had its own button which, when pressed, stopped down the lens and triggered the shutter.

[ebiggs1]

B from B

There are several of these 400mm and 500mm 'preset' lenses.  Several different brands but essentially the very same lens.

They are made by a single or very few manufacturers.  The term preset in this case means you have to take a light reading and stop it down before you shoot. You are able to focus wide open for all that's worth!

I have had several of them over the years.  They are very old designs going way back into the film era of the 70's maybe even earlier.

They are not great.  They are not horrible but they work and are extremely cheap. They are not as hard to use as someone suggested. It's just 'old school'.  If you were there you would be fine with one.

[ebiggs1]

"...they give horrible donut bokeh on the out of focus highlights."

So the key is to know how to use one.  They can be quite nice lenses.

[Waddizzle]

"They are not great.  They are not horrible but they work and are extremely cheap. They are not as hard to use as someone suggested. It's just 'old school'.  If you were there you would be fine with one."

I suppose that it depends upon which Bower 500mm f/8 lens you're talking about.

I'm talking about long one on the right.  The one that looks like a telescope, the refractor, not the reflector on the left. 

The lens on the left right is not easy to focus because of the small rotation adjustment on the focus ring, and the tripod foot isn't snug enough to fully suppress vibrations.  It is nearly 12 inches long, and has a MFD of 10 meters.  It does not balance well on a tripod.

BTW, the lens on the left has no tripod foot.  The brand of lens that you mentioned earlier looks to be much better than this.