100x Lens shoots last Concorde flight

Bigger is not always better, I thought, as I heaved the Canon 100x lens out of the van. Bigger is heavier, bigger is more expensive... but I have to admit bigger is better when it comes to performance and versatility.

By Michael Brennan, Director of Photography, London

T he assignment was to document Concorde’s last landings at Heathrow on High Definition. The dilemma was that with traffic congestion and security I could not move between camera positions, I would have to settle for one position and stick with it all day.

Just the job for the 100x lens!

I opted for a media scaffold position 300 yards from touchdown and  1 kilometre from the terminal building. This  would give me wide shots of Heathrow, the crowds a good angle on the final approach and touchdown. But details of the terminal and reaction of airport workers would be a challenge.
The scaffold platform was rather lively to say the least as it was 200 feet long and occupied by  as many gate crashing plane spotters as the worlds media. Hard to tell the two apart really! Fortunately the 100x  comes equipped with the popular image stabilisation system well loved by users of the 86x and just as effective on the 100x

The total weight of head, camera and lens was around 60 kilos.   The f900 HD camera requires the viewfinder rail and a arri mattbox  plate removed, standard practice with fitting box lenses to the f900. The lens was powered by separate battery via convenient 4 pin socket. It can be powered  through the camera but I was using a thirsty HD LCD display from the camera supply.

Ones first impression is that the range is awesome. Focal length range from 9.3mm to 930mm I could go from a wide shot of the whole airport to head and shoulders of a pilot, without the doubler. In fact I rarely used the doubler so I maintained highest possible quality with little or no ramping. Later in the day I stayed to do night shots of the airport where f1.7  at around 300mm produces some extraordinary shots. This is an important point as for some applications one should consider this lens not for its zoom range but for its fast aperture.
For instance the 40x is f3.65 at 300mm. Backfocus control is conveniently placed and easy to operate,  just as well as backfocus is such a critical issue with HD. It is not surprising that with such a large front diameter that flare takes its toll. The wide angle precludes much of a fixed lens hood. The only solution would be some kind of motorized hood. One needs greater control of flare in HD than SD.
The resolution and contest for a lens this size are superb. But as one would expect the lens is slightly softer/flatter than smaller HD zooms which are, in turn slightly softer than HD primes. I might add that I did not  conduct a test and that these were my observations back in the edit suite. I’d say 90% of the flattening was down to not being able to control flare from the hot sky. But in my view it is a good sign that you can see the effects of uncontrolled  spill into the lens as this means the lens is really delivering lots of shadow detail. On blowing up the images in the computer there is virtually no Chromatic aberration.  
Part of the HD discipline should be to control spill into a lens. My application was for large screen presentation, for TV broadcast one can be less concerned. Who would have thought just a few years ago that a 100x lens would be available and capable of delivering a sharp rich image to a 60 foot screen.

Where do we go from here?