Canon FD lense for bird photography

fazle_saeed · November 3, 2014

I am using canon 550D. I mostly shoot birds. Currently I am using one 55-250 IS and one 70-300 USM (this one was very good lens)… but accidentally I broke my 70-300 USM. As I’m on budget I decided to buy a old SLR lens from e-bay like canon 400mm FD lens or Sigma 400mm canon mount lens.

Can anyone advice me what will be better for me?

ant_nio_marques · November 3, 2014

You do know that FD lenses use a different mount from the EF found in modern Canon cameras?

rick_janes · November 4, 2014

Fazle, the difficulty with using genuine Canon FD lenses on EOS bodies is in finding adapters that allow sufficient

focusing range, much less to infinity. Of your given choices it's by far the more expensive and the one likely to

frustrate!

Another option is to find an old third-party telephoto that used T-mount adapters and obtain an adapter for EF (EOS) use.

There were plenty of pre-set aperture 400mm teles produced for T-mounts and they can be bought very inexpensively.

No, they are not the optical quality of a genuine FD lens but some are surprisingly good...in my early years I used a

Spiratone 400/6.3 with very decent results. Today I still own a Vivitar Series 1 600 f/8 "Solid Cat" that uses T-mount

adapters, and have them for both EF and FD mounts...it works well and without any problems of focusing range.

JDMvW · November 4, 2014

Probably the easiest lenses to adapt to ALL-MANUAL use on a Canon EOS camera are the M42x1 (Praktica/Pentax) screw mount and Nikon F-mount lenses (the non-Ai ones work just fine).

Adapters for either are cheap, widely available, and require no optics or fasten-down screws or other such impedimenta. The M42 lenses are often superb. For birds, if you are working from a 'stand', the various mirror lenses like the Vivitar spoken of above will work very fine, if you don't mind 'donut' bokeh. There are direct T-mount to EOS mounts available for many of those.

For the M42 lenses with auto-aperture pins, buy an adapter with a small flange that will depress the aperture pin.<div></div>

JDMvW · November 4, 2014

Of course, I forgot to say, the mirror lenses (catadioptric) have but one aperture, regardless, so the aperture pin business applies to refractor lenses.

Ken Katz · November 5, 2014

For reasons that are well documented, FD lenses simply don't work on an EOS camera. I would also avoid older Sigma lenses, due to potential malfunctions on newer EOS cameras. A Sigma lens which is documented to work with your 550D would likely be Ok and newer Sigma lenses seem to work fine.

Unless you are willing to give up auto focus, auto aperture, and IS, then looking at adapting older manual focus lenses would not be a practical solution. Assuming the lens that broke is the 70-300 USM/IS model (which is a reasonably good lens), have you looked into getting it fixed or picking up a used model to save money? You could also look into getting a Tamron 70-300 VR lens, which is generally sold cheaper than the Canon 70-300IS and is purported to have similar optical qualities.

For EOS compatible lenses in the 400-600mm range, Bob Atkins has a review on many of those options, and also reviews on the Canon and Tamron 70-300 lenses (plus lots of useful information on EOS cameras)

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/eosfaq/telefoto.htm