u/ian_oc

By popular request, om-recipes.com now supports MONO recipes! Instead of the color wheel, share recipes with filter color, intensity, film grain, and hue.

Here’s my initial MONO recipe: Ode to Ansel (https://om-recipes.com/recipes/ian-will\_ode-to-ansel). It’s my preferred way to shoot black and white landscapes—with a strong red filter for dark skies and lots of contrast and sharpness. Here are a few sample shots.

Also note that sharing recipes on om-recipes is as easy as drag, drop, click. It only accepts unedited JPGs straight out of an OM-3, but aside from choosing a name, it’s about as easy as I could make it. All the settings are extracted from the JPG.

I’ve been enjoying some back yard bird photography recently as a morning ritual, though it’s not my main genre. More often I’m shooting kids sports, family adventures, and cityscapes. Occasionally I’ll shoot Milky Way or moon shots when I’m in a good location.

I have a 75-300 and a 40-150 f/2.8 with both teleconvertors. I find the 40-150 f/2.8 with the 2.0 that the quality isn’t stellar. About par with the 75-300. That quality is pretty decent, but a little more reach and a little more sharpness would be fun. Small birds are part of the draw, but I’d also imagine I’d use it perhaps for kids sports and moon alignments occasionally.

The 50-200 f/2.8 and the 300mm f/4 are appealing, but a bit beyond what I can justify even used. I don’t want to spend $3k.

Seems like the 100-400 is the best move. Curious to hear thoughts or advice. Is the 100-400 significantly better than what I have? Is it worth upgrading for sharpness and reach, or should I hold out for a good deal on a used 300mm f/4? Or is this GAS and I should just enjoy the super-light 75-300 for what it is, and stop fretting about image quality?

This is such a fun little combo! You can’t beat the compactness of the 75-300. These are all sooc. Some are up to iso 25600 (needed in 1/1600 @ f6.7 in forest shade, even in broad daylight). They’d clean up better with processing, but I’m enjoying the simplicity of camera -> phone -> share.
For those curious, bird subject detection doesn’t do great with partially obscured birds. I had to use smallest af point and even then it would hunt between bird and leaves.