Broke the Mongo Lens out for some shoreline whale shots yesterday. It didn’t work as well as I hoped – Mongo is designed to be tripod mounted, and I was lugging the thing around as a handheld. That gave me some focus problems – the autofocus isn’t that fast. So I got a lot of out of focus shots. And, as I was trying to get extreme closeups at the 600mm limit of the thing, my field of view was really small. So…not a lot of great shots. Here are a few of the better ones – a whale was playing just a few feet offshore, scraping barnacles off its hide by rolling in the sandy bottom. In the second photo you can see the barnacles quite well.

Mongo did a fine job capturing a full moon, however. Same for a flock of birds above Lands End, in the title photo above.

The Sigma 60-600mm zoom, aka Mongo, is a nice lens with some tradeoffs, same as any extreme optical instrument. Just not the optimal lens for getting the best whale shots from shore. In retrospect, my much cheaper and smaller Tamron 70-300mm would’ve done better. So I’m glad I rented Mongo instead of buying it. Live and learn.

This all reminds me of something I read online about audio, but I’ll apply it here to photography. Artistic types use their gear to capture beautiful images. Engineers use their images to test their gear. I’m definitely in the latter group.