Nikon 70-300 VR ED problem

[mvtol]

Hello,

It's been a while! I recently bought a second hand D7200. It's realy an upgrade from my D300. It produces very sharp pictures of birds in my garden with my 70-300. However when I'm shooting flying birds from about 30 meters, there's no sharpness at all. I've tried AF-c Af-s Af-a, but it makes no difference. What can be the problem here. On my D300 I've never had any problems. Here are two pictures at 300mm, one close by and one far away: both crops. Thanks!

Regards Martijn van Tol

 

 

[luis triguez]

Have you tried shooting at 1/1000 better?

As I see in the Exif from your second picture: f9 at 1/400 might be too slow for a 300mm (450in at 7200).

If you open a couple of stops you will get lot more speed.

Good luck Martijn.

[mvtol]

Have you tried shooting at 1/1000 better?

As I see in the Exif from your second picture: f9 at 1/400 might be too slow for a 300mm (450in at 7200).

If you open a couple of stops you will get lot more speed.

Good luck Martijn.

Thank you, I'll try tomorrow.

[mike_halliwell]

My copy was REALLY soft at the long end at any sort of modest range, say 10m and beyond.... and shots looked just like yours.

 

I guess you could try a tripod mounted, LV AF focus etc shot at the same target range to see if the lens can be nice.

 

Mine failed that test. OK at 200mm, but not at the long end.

[mvtol]

Much better now, thanks Luis.

 

[luis triguez]

I'm glad everything is going better. I have no complaint of mine and I use it a lot at 300mm.

These are examples all at 300mm except the first one at 170mm. All of them with a Nikon D2X and no tripod.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Matthew Currie]

My wife had one of these with her D7200, and found it reasonably sharp even at 300 mm. If you're in an expansive mood, the later 70-300 AFP (the FX version) is slightly, but noticeably, sharper at 300, even pretty decent wide open, and although the older VR lens is pretty fast focusing, the P is also noticeably faster. I bought one to replace my 55-300DX, and my wife liked it so much she replaced her 70-300VR too.

 

Birds in flight can always be a little bit of a problem anyway, and even with a good lens and lots of practice, I miss plenty. One thing you might want to do is to experiment to see if the focus point of your camera is a little bit offset from where the viewfinder mark is. Ours are fine, but I gather they are not always, and if so it can be very hard to hit a distant bird. If you set up a fairly distant object that appears about the size of your center focus point, surrounded by out of focus sky, and put the camera on a tripod, you can slowly pan and by watching the confirmation dot, find the boundaries of your AF point.