That post is all interesting stuff and fun technical talk, but it is completely irrelevant and speculative. And I strongly disagree with the last sentence. 500 mph at 8 miles away, and heading more perpendicular to your line of sight is MUCH more difficult to track than 5,000 mph at 100 miles away traveling closer to parallel to your line of sight.
BTW, fwiw, I used to have a zoom lens and doubler for my Canon A1 back in the early 80’s. The double degraded the picture too much via dark and blurry corners and overall contrast to the point that it didn’t take me long to stop using it. I was young and cheap - It was all about “my lens is bigger than yours”. :)
My friend that I went to Hawaii with last week is a Leica rnagefinder film camera nut (he shot 8 rolls while we were there). He just bought one with the Zeiss f .95 50mm lens for around $150 at a junk/antique shop last spring. It cost him $200 to refurbish the camera and he just sold the lens on the internet for $1,600 (he was asking $2,500). He put different glass on the camera because the .95 lens was way too big (diameter), heavy and impractical, but the guy that bought it just had to have the “one of a kind” lens. That thing weighed a ton. It was like holding a big flat hand full of glass. My friend is doing these sort of deals to build up his funds for a super Leica digital setup.
And yeah, wide open it had almost no DOF. And the guy he sold it to got a great deal, relative to the lenses actual value.
You are being evasive, I’m not talking about tracking a moving object, I’m talking about capturing video. That is to say: the complex dynamics of filming in total to get the best possible image. -— In this case the degradation of video quality is indicative of distance from the lens. Its not really speculative as you’ve stated, it more of an experience thing.
Well RobRoy, it’s been interesting discussing this with you although I’m not sure why you’re so closed off to reasonable discussion. — Have good say.