Look what the photography elves brought me!

I found this in the bottom drawer of my cabinet at work. In case you haven't embiggened it to see the full impact, that is a 15 inch ruler. It weighs 2 kilos. Yeah.

Here's a few quick photos, hand held, all at 600 mm. The ball diamond across the street from our patio. Uncropped. I'm not sure how far the guy in red shorts is away, perhaps 100 m?

Minimum focus distance is about 9 feet, and I was pretty close to that here.

These are a little further away.

The focus point was on the left most flower and you can see the texture of the blossom. The others are every so slightly out of focus. I'm not sure that's a hand held thing, or just where the plane of focus is for those settings.

I'm loving the colour in the flowers! These are tweaked slightly, but not much. I'll have to do a more formal lens comparison, maybe this weekend.

My buddy doesn't use it much anymore, since she doesn't shoot on a tripod much, and this is a heavy lens. For my photo buddies it's the Tamron 150-600 mm, the version 1, not the new version. I've been wondering how much I'd use such a lens, and now I'll get a chance to find out, since she's happy to lend it to me a few weeks. Then we can haggle for price. Full moon is Aug 26. Hmmm.