The most frustrating thing I experienced was an incredible bird in the middle of a field. Out of about 10 shots, only two maybe three had critical focus. I couldn't understand what was going on. Happened a few times; mostly with birds. Here's the best of the series: These were all taken stopped down a good deal, unlike most all the shots taken during my Tanzania outing which were mostly taken at or near wide open.

The filter holder is intriguing. The filter is circular and you screw it on as you would a normal circular filter. The difference is the 46mm filter went inside the body on the lens. The filter is not there to be cool, more as a bit of pleasing engineering. Basically you do not have to buy a filter to fit the ~119 front of the lens. That saves a bit of money. The other big AF problem I had was that this lens severely front-focused at the wide end of the focal length range on two different Canon-calibrated bodies. Weighing in at a whopping 3390g and measuring 29cm in length, the Sigma 120-300mm F2.8 DG OS HSM S is a very big and heavy lens indeed, esepcially as that weight doesn't include the supplied tripod collar. As seen in the photos below, it dwarves even a full-frame camera like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. This is not a lens that you can hand-hold for very long, being much more at home mounted on a sturdy tripod or monopod. The OS is genuinely good, not just a promise as with the Variable Reliability system. Not true that it has no CA - it's there but it's blue-yellow, which is much less noticeable than magenta-green, and is a non-issue in practice, even against the light.Does suffer from CAs & purple fringing. You can see it in the sun's reflection in the eye of the Dik-Dik below at the very end (last image)... and some bird shots into a gray cloudy sky shows it in the tree branches. This is generally a good thing and HSM in this implementation is very quiet, includes FTM (Full Time Manual) focusing, is rear-focusing, does not extend and the front element does not rotate. The lens comes with a tripod collar which has a strong knob; but it’s easy to adjust. I only used it to switch the camera from landscape to portrait when mounted on a tripod. Nikon forgot to label this switch as the AF BUTTON FUNCTION. This sets what the four little rubber buttons around the front of the lens do.

Here's a few of the more easily missed or overlooked specs that may be important to some photographers. Lens weight and size dimensions are in a separate section below. As I have already pointed out in my Sigma 1.4x teleconverter review, none of the Nikon teleconverters mount on Sigma lenses. It turns out that teleconverters are brand-specific – Nikon teleconverters are designed to only work well with Nikkor lenses, while Sigma teleconverters are designed to only work well with Sigma lenses. So if you were thinking of buying a Sigma 2x teleconverter to be used for a Nikon telephoto or super-telephoto lens – forget it. Even though the teleconverter will physically mount on any Nikon telephoto lens that can take teleconverters and might perform well optically, it will still cause all kinds of lens communication and autofocus issues. For example, when I mounted the teleconverter on the Nikon 300mm f/2.8G VR II lens, it confused my camera into thinking that the maximum aperture of the lens was still at f/2.8 (the correct max aperture is f/5.6 instead, since 2x teleconverters lose two full stops of light). I also lost the ability to autofocus – the teleconverter caused the Nikon 300mm lens to go to an AF loop. In short, only use this teleconverter with Sigma lenses! The new 300mm F2.8 G Master OSS lens will take inspiration from the Sony’s other G Master telephotos, such as its 600mm F4 G Master OSS and 400mm F2.8 G Master OSS, both of which we’ve found to be incredibly fast and sharp, as is to be expected from Sony’s high-end G Master lineup. MEMORY RECALL lets us save and recall a distance, like home plate or the bird feeder. Once saved, tap any of the front buttons and the lens immediately refocuses to that distance.

The foot of the tripod collar is strong and supported the lens well. It has a 1/4 20 hole so it easily mounted onto a tripod shoe. The Canon lenses mentioned include IS - not important for sports photography but very helpful for other handheld scenarios.

Hot Extra 5% - 10% Savings Payboo Deal at B&H ends Tomorrow – Canon EOS R5, R3, and Many Other Items Included! Some CA/color fringing at and near wide open but only at very high contrast edges. No focus limiter is trying at times. Sometimes just wouldn't autofocus with the subject right in-front of you ( yes, subject further then minimum focus) In this section I describe the results of head-to-head field-testing of the optical performance of the Nikkor 120-300mm f2.8E against several competing lenses at three focal lengths, four camera-to-subject distances, and a wide range of apertures. The focal lengths, distances to subject, and apertures over which the lenses were tested and compared are discussed in Appendix 1: Methods: Optical Performance. Note that in this section only native focal lengths are considered (i.e., the lenses shot without teleconverters). Optical performance with both the TC-14EIII (1.4x) and TC-20EIII (2x) teleconverters are in a section below. How well (or poorly) it works w/ the Sigma converters is largely a matter of users' expectations. IMO the IQ w/ the 1.4x is still close to excellent; significantly better than cropping the image done w/o the converter, and with the benefit of better magnification in close-ups. With the 2x there is a greater loss of IQ, but combo is still usable and still yields better IQ than cropping the 300mm image; the biggest loss IMO is in contrast. Of course a 600mm combination is very vulnerable to subject motion, so high shutter speeds are called for in many situations, but that would be the same issue with almost any very long lens or combination. I have been doing a little work to keep improving my photography. One of the things I have been doing to get out of my comfort zones is to shoot with telephoto lenses. You see, I usually shoot with small fast prime lenses. When given a chance to work with the Sigma 300mm F2.8 EX APO DG I jumped at it. After a bit of soreness I started having a lot of fun with this lens. This is no ordinary lens. What Sigma has done is basically taken a telephoto lens, given it a big aperture, with internal focusing and made it ridiculously fun.I own this lens in the Pentax mount and used it for about two years. I then moved to Canon and bought the 300 IS and now the Caono 300 II lens. With the lens mounted on the full-frame 5D, we see similar results, with an increase in the level of corner softness. Wide open at ƒ/2.8, we again see an average of around 2 blur units, just slightly better in the center and significantly softer in the corners - in this case, between 3-5 blur units. Stopping down doesn't do much to improve the corner softening, it just seems to move it around (our sample may be slightly de-centered). Central sharpness improves slightly, but by ƒ/5.6 you've reached the apex of what this lens can offer for sharpness (it's quite similar at ƒ/8) - a small region of sharpness in the center, 1-1.5 blur units, and escalating corner softness - between 2 and 4 blur units. Diffraction limiting sets in at ƒ/11, and again, it's still quite usable at ƒ/22. Fully stopped-down at ƒ/32, results are just as soft on full-frame as they are on sub-frame. Sports photography is the primary market for the Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM Lens, but there are other good uses for it. Focuses well enough, but not quite 'ultimate performance' as I wasn't able to catch running gazelles or wildebeests running to or from me too well. It auto focuses much slower when you engage the manual focus ring as well. If you slid the focus rind forward so manual focus is disengaged, it's much faster. An image of Sony’s 400mm F2.8 G Master OSS lens. The forthcoming 300mm F2.8 G Master OSS lens will likely have a lot of similarities to its longer telephoto sibling. Image credit: Sony