Shooting with the Biggest Camera Lens

The Biggest Zoom Lens You’ll Ever See is…

“The Beast” , a 1200-1700mm f5.6 IF-ED Nikon Zoom converted to Canon. The tripod is a gigantic MANFROTTO with a video head.

Mal Langsdon (Reuters Head of Pictures Operations for France, BENELUX, Italy, Iberia and Greece, based in Paris) used this amazing lens to capture a photograph of France’s president Sarkozy surrounded by the mounted Republican guard as he waves from a command car driving down the Champs Elysee.

You really need to read about the environment he had to endure, the military press attaché who commented on his ‘size’ and see the photograph he finally managed to shoot! Mal says it is easier to shoot long distance shots manually than with auto-focus because then you have less trouble locking onto a tiny moving figure or object in a dynamic environment.

Update [5/Sept/2008]

Thanks to external links to this article, here are a few links of interest:

This is a better view of The Beast, extracted from a scanned from a 1998’s Nikkor Sales Guide and retouched to restore to supposed colours.

And here is a range of Nikon Super Tele-zoom lenses. You’d be a highly paid professional photographer to able to afford many of these, but there’s no harm in drooling over them.

Update [26/April/2009]

Canon also have a few massive lens, but you’d need to be a complete photography nerd to even think about buying any of these Canon gargantuan mammoths!

The image below reveals the…

• Canon TV lens 800mm f3.8,
• Canon TV lens 2000mm f11, and
• Canon TV lens 5200mm f14