Shutterstock Photographer Forum :: View topic - Extension tubes on a canon 70-200 mk2?

mreco · Joined: 12 Mar 2009 Posts: 1146 Location: Hampshire, UK

Hi,

What effect does putting Extension tubes on a canon 70-200 mk2?

You dont get more zoom do you?

I know what the converters do.

thanks

ruxpriencdiam · Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2011 6:36 pm

No they let you get closer to what you are shooting.

Instead of having to be at least 5 feet away depending which ones you use you may be able to get down to 3 feet away.

mreco · Joined: 12 Mar 2009 Posts: 1146 Location: Hampshire, UK

without any loss of anything, ie iq is etc?
hmm bit boring lol

so it makes no difference on a long shot?

Mike Price · Joined: 06 Jun 2008 Posts: 2919 Location: South Wales

Extension tubes are for close up photography and increase effective magnification for any given lens by getting in much closer than you can without them, if you want to extend the length of a lens such as the 70-200 L you need to buy a teleconvertor.

There are two available for Canon, a 1.4x and a 2x. The 1.4x loses one stop so if you have an F4 it becomes an F5.6. A F2.8 becomes a F4 max aperture. The 2x loses 2 stops but you need to be aware that a F4 will not autfocus with the 2x but the F2.8 will.

Mike

triceratops · Joined: 15 Nov 2006 Posts: 7861 Location: The other Nevada

Back in my film shooting days I used a similar combination, except I had a bellows attached to a zoom lens. Like Mike said, this is only for close-up shots. You gain a bit of the zoom function in a close-up setting, but not as much as you may think. Still it helped me with some of my stuff.

joeygil · Joined: 09 Aug 2005 Posts: 481

Use of extension tubes makes you loose your ability to focus at something far. So, that's when you take it off. Other than that, there isn't even any glass in the way ("optical quality air"), so no image degradation.

AF might be wonky, so you may have to manually focus.