Amateur Needs Question Answered

[TheSlicingEdge]

Hello, I am an amateur airplane photographer and I have a question:Is the quality of the photo degraded if the lens is not at full zoom or minimum zoom.

For example: I have a lens that is 70-300 if I take a picture at 250mm will the quality be different then if the picture was taken at 300mm.

 

This only applies to TELEPHOTO

[Nexxus]

To my understanding as long as its an optical zoom and not digital quality is the same. I could be wrong though.

[ALwin]

4 hours ago, TheSlicingEdge said:

Hello, I am an amateur airplane photographer and I have a question:Is the quality of the photo degraded if the lens is not at full zoom or minimum zoom.

For example: I have a lens that is 70-300 if I take a picture at 250mm will the quality be different then if the picture was taken at 300mm.

 

This only applies to TELEPHOTO

No difference if you're talking about using the same lens set at 250mm or 300m. If you're talking about using two different lenses, a zoom lens vs. a 300mm prime lens, there might be differences but again often the differences are not noticeable once the photo passes the editing stage.  Some differences are not even noticeable just by looking at the images that come directly out of the camera, unless one of the lenses happen to be particularly bad or you are intentionally looking for the differences.

 

The biggest difference you will have between shooting at 250mm vs. 300mm with the same lens on the same camera body: Your composition.

[.spider.]

Yes the difference in image quality can be enormous, but it obviously depends on the lens. 

For example here at 200mm http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/411-canon_55250_456is_50d?start=1

There is a massive drop of sharpness. 

[bob345]

21 hours ago, TheSlicingEdge said:

Hello, I am an amateur airplane photographer and I have a question:Is the quality of the photo degraded if the lens is not at full zoom or minimum zoom.

For example: I have a lens that is 70-300 if I take a picture at 250mm will the quality be different then if the picture was taken at 300mm.

 

This only applies to TELEPHOTO

like others have said, it is definitely possible for image quality to get sharper or softer at different ranges of a telephoto zoom. In fact its even possible for a lenses performance to change between focusing. I wouldn't worry much about this though as the majority of the time its not going to make any kind of a big difference as manufactures correct for these kind of problems. You really only notice big differences in older lenses before CAD and CFD was a big thing in engineering.