Home Forums Gear Photography Need a longer lens

A (well-off!) friend has the Canon 800mm f 5.6 L series lens, and this is the Whimberley tripod head he uses with it. It allows the lens/camera to hang perfectly balanced and thus permits smooth tracking of flying birds, etc. My friend has about 6 or 8 very expensive tripod heads, and after buying this one, he says he will never buy another.



And a picture of the lens and a human for scale:


He is a serious photographer, but does not like computers so I download and archive his pictures for him. This means I get to see all the images that he actually took, not just one or two of the best pictures or pictures already fixed up in Photoshop. I am always impressed at the extremely high ratio of damn-near perfect pictures! It has more advanced image-stabilization than the Canon 600 mm L lens... (another that I can not afford myself!)

The lens is awesome (see the review at this site, or one of many others. Camera buffs love to read reviews -- especially of equipment that they can only fantasize about! My friend was a big fan on Nikon, but switched to Canon because of their "L" series lenses.

Bad news is that this lens is about $US 12,000 in the 'States.

John