Well, the whole sordid story, it was sitting in my camera bag and I opened it one time by yanking up the lid and the bag tilted forward and dumped the lens into the carpet. Oops. =(
As for the results, well, when I zoom in pictures get really soft, but they’re soft in one direction like a Photoshop “motion blur” filter. So it’s like an element is tilted somehow so it’s blurring the picture in one direction. I don’t have any pictures to show you because, well, I deleted them, but trust me it looked simply awful. It was even visible at Fark size.
It’s not that bad at all at the shorter lengths, though, I took all of the photos for the “Sports” contest with the lens in this state. I just made sure I kept the focal length under 200mm and it worked fine. For example the tennis shot was taken from half court (and I got the shot when he was up by the net), the hurdler shot from right next to the hurdles (I knew shooting straight down the track like most photogs would require too much tele) and the softball pitcher from right off the 3rd base line.
The thing that finally made me cave and send it in though was when a black bear showed up in our neighborhood, second one in ten years, and in the interest of safety I couldn’t get close enough to get in the range that would be sharp with this broken lens. I probably could have sold it to some newspapers too if I’d had a lens that worked. Darn.
