Been a while.

I headed down to Cutler’s Park in El Segundo this weekend as a first daytime shooting test of a used lens I picked up recently — a Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM. It’s an old unit sourced through a random Japan-based seller on Amazon and the whole thing is a lot sketchier than I’m used to. Usually Japan-based sellers for whatever reason do an exceptional job at accurately rating their used photography equipment, and until now I’ve never received an item from Japan where I disagreed with the grading (this is true when it comes to vinyl records also). Despite the seller’s listed location, Amazon fulfillment started in Austin so this lens was possibly returned recently by someone else who found its condition unacceptable (I am still on the fence). The most obvious problem is that the lens hood is always loose unless it’s tightened into its extended position. This now-discontinued model has an integral lens hood that retracts for storage and is supposed to be held retracted via friction between the optical tube and the hood’s felt liner, but decades of abuse have left it with enough slop that it slides forward or backward freely with no resistance. The body was also extremely dirty with numerous small sticky spots like it had been operated by someone with sugar-coated fingers. I cleaned the exterior thoroughly and it looks better but the paint is thoroughly chipped and there are countless deep scratches, indicating an impressive lack of care by a previous owner. On the plus side, through some miracle the filter threads appear undamaged, the optics are reasonably clean, and the aperture and auto-focus operate as expected.

I also tested this with an old Canon EF 1.4x teleconverter (TC) that a Craigslist seller tossed in on some other random purchase over a decade ago. This brings the equivalent focal length to 560mm, and max aperture of only f/8.0. Taping off three of the interface pins turned on auto-focus with my old 6D via the center AF point; seemed to work fine under bright conditions, at least. I had expected this given that Canon’s marketing boasted that this camera body is capable of auto-focus under moonlight. The auto-focus cutout above f/8.0 is apparently mostly artificial, possibly as a differentiator for sports/wildlife photographers who may have been tempted by a 6D over a 5D Mark II at the time. It’s worth noting that my EOS 3 (a prosumer film body released in 1998) can auto-focus just fine through the 1.4x TC without the need for taping pins.

The atmospheric conditions were not geat. As is typical for the South Bay, the heavy ocean air muted the blues in the sky and left mostly gray and bland feelings all the way until sunset, when some colors briefly appeared to the west. The seeing was terrible and anything beyond the nearest runway was severely blurred by the turbulent air. Using the 1.4x TC briefly, the quality on short shots and auto-focus were fine, but the extended focal length was no help against airplane-sized subjects due to the poor seeing. Any aircraft that was far enough away to fit into the field of view at 560mm was far enough away that the seeing made a sharp photo impossible. Wasted pixels. I stowed the TC after only a few minutes and feel that while 560mm is too long, 400mm on a full frame is not a terrible choice for prime lens shooting from Cutler’s Park.

Given that this lens has no image stabilization (IS), I used a tripod with a 3-axis pan/tilt/roll head, with only the roll-axis locked down. This lens isn’t as heavy as a lot of super-telephotos out there, but it was nice to not have to support it for the 90 minutes I was shooting. Overall I think the lens is fine, although the loose hood is extremely annoying. I’ve been keeping it stowed with a piece of blue painter’s tape which is a real hassle and may be enough to compel returning it and looking for a better used copy. I don’t shoot enough telephoto stuff to justify spending much more than I already have on this, so a new unit from Canon’s in-production lineup (starting in the thousands of dollars) is out of the question. At this point, whether I return it or not depends on if I think fixing the hood slop will be a doable DIY effort or not.

Anyway, here are some photos I shot along with 2 quick-and-dirty stitched panoramas in 48:9 aspect ratio, suitable for a three-wide UHD desktop wallpaper. For the two takeoff photos of the Lufthansa A380 I ended up going to ISO 12800, which is well outside the usable range for a Canon 6D in my opinion. This aircraft was waiting on the taxiway for a really long time and took off well past when there was sufficient light for an f/5.6 telephoto with no IS. By the time they took off I knew the images would be junk at such a high ISO but shot them anyway. I post-processed them in Topaz Photo AI which has a RAW denoise model — it’s passable sometimes but tends to overdo it, and turning the strength down introduces a lot of low-frequency noise and artifacts. There’s probably a better tool for this but since I almost never shoot high ISO it hasn’t been worth the time to experiment. I think the jet wash and wake turbulence looks cool against the airport background. Also the four vortices coming over the wings from the engine nacelles in the last photo are neat.