I was taking some night pictures on a tripod last night with the 70-200/2.8 (mk 1). I noticed that with a slight amount of gusty breeze, exposures longer than 1/50th of a sec were getting smeared... and I really needed to get up to about 2-3 seconds for the aperture I wanted (so even outside the range of IS compensation). It really seemed like there was a lot of play between the tripod ring and the lens, the lens and the body, and the ring's foot and the tripod's baseplate. I won't even get into how bad it got with an extender on.


Do I have a faulty tripod ring? Or is this standard behavior? I recognize I'm using this lens outside of its typical usage envelope like this. Is there any way to improve it? I had every knob on the tripod, baseplate, and tripod ring twisted as tight as I could. The tripod (manfrotto 055b) seemed to be stable compared to the multiple degrees of motion the camera was making.


I presume such flex is not nearly as bad in the 400/2.8-and-up super teles. Can anyone confirm?


Thanks.