December 2022
The Flying Fruitfly Circus was performing outdoors in Albury so I attended with my F6, Portra 800 and my Nikon 80-400 f/4-5.6.
The lens is everything I want in a sharp, flexible zoom for relatively still subjects. At 1.5kg it is around 750g lighter than my 200-500mm f/5.6 bird lens. The VR is not quite up to the longer zoom, causing unsharp images if I forget to turn it off at shutter speeds over 1/1000, but that was not a problem on this day.
In most situations this lens and the F6 make a fine pair, but today I discovered that in fast moving action the F6 doesn’t track well at f/5.6. This was never a problem with my 300 f/4D. Group focus locked on instantly but at the long end of the zoom the F6 was unable to follow some of the fast moving acrobats.
It was this outing that convinced me that a high-speed digital would have been the right camera. I ordered a D6 the following week. While I still enjoy the F6 for more sedate photography the D6 is now my choice for anything that moves.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed my outing. As soon as I realised that f/5.6 was beyond the F6 for moving subjects I began waiting for the exact moment when the performers paused or came to the end of a swing before taking the shot. The F6 has a particularly responsive shutter button so timing each shot was easy.
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