This is why the trip to Bellingham this afternoon.
This lens was manufactured around 1975 so that makes it 45-46 years old. They only made 200 of them and the last one came off the line in September 1977. This one was #36 so it was in the initial batch. This was the last of the original (classical) 600mm designs but it was the first to incorporate Nikon's new Enhanced Dispersion glass (noted as ED). After this, they went to a design using a relay lens - this shortened the overall length but introduced more elements into the optical path. There is a trade-off between compact size and optical quality.
It is in pristine quality - the people at the camera store and I were both thinking that it had seen almost no field use. The focusing mechanism is silky smooth, no grit. The glass is flawless - no scratches or mold.
Most of what I do are either critter or landscapes. I also do technical photography and love closeups but landscapes are my favorite medium. I have been wanting a really long lens for many many years and this puppy finally came to live with me.
Alright you are saying - photos or it didn't happen:
The top unit is the optics. The bottom unit is the focusing tube, iris, camera mount and there is a cute little sliding drawer that can hold an internal filter.
Big hunk 'o glass...
Off the deck with a Nifty 50 - shooting at F8/1200 at ISO640 - lots of smoke in the air so crappy day to try to show any sort of image quality...
Same camera, same location, same crappy air but shot with the 600 - again, F8/1200 at ISO640 Talk about: "Reach out and touch someone" The boat is roughly 4,000 feet distant. To be able to resolve the bow line is amazing. Especially since I cut the resolution of this photo down to 640 pixels wide so it would not hog the bandwidth. There is a lot more detail on the original RAW file.
And finally - the whole package:
Needless to say, I will be building a rigid case for it. Big enough so that I can carry it fully assembled. I also need to re-jigger how it mounts to the tripod. The camera makes it a bit back-heavy. Figure something out. A fun project.
This part of the world is smack on several major bird migratory paths as well as home to resident populations of interesting critters. Looking forward to some fun times ahead...
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