I have now started to look at sigma 60-600mm with a 2x viltrox teleconverter because it works for others & the image stabilization & all the rest is good to go it just doesn't report the exif? exgif? data back to the image to have it be a part of it. That's all? Not bad at all. The main thing for me is high altitude & extremely long ranges are common for things around here for wildlife & for specific styles of art photo vibes I'm looking to do. I put out an old heavily edited windmill shot that needed a lower f stop to gain a heavier style of mirage & pin-hole-ish effect that I was trying to have mimic schlieren imaging but it really sucked, but I was able to pull it out a bit. I ended up hating it & had to work it back in editing for hours. I wasn't even going to attempt to show it off but I ended up liking the darker dystopian vibes it gave after enough time in darktable.
Hours of editing is just too dang much. It's stupendously too long. So I ran from tying it again. I have only a few bird pics & I'm annoyed. Same for quite a few different animal pictures. It's been... Impossible, basically, to get close enough to do it.
As for a, possible, solution for your f4 sony lens woes, the sony zeiss (as if you don't know them come on) 16-35mm & (i think its this) 24-70mm vario-tessa (I am a zeiss fan boy, it is what it is) t* is a great combo for most people starting off in youtube & regular online content creation. I feel at least. That isn't you. What I recommending, again as if you don't know this, is a wide angle for that extra. It's professional silly, right?
Wellllll... I dunno, its a magnifying glass to a larger total viewing mm. You will lose light, yes, but the total on the whole increases the light gained. The problem is mismatch & finding anything at all that can even remotely fit to these larger lenses for threading. The done well & can be used ones are, well yes expensive isn't it always seemingly, very capable however it comes with a cost of it can only help bring you down to the mm range you may be wanting but it beats changing things. Sometimes, that's a good way to get they needed results.
It's just that they aren't Fresnel lenses or proper taper fiber optics, or even nicer just f-theta lens from fiber optic lasers. It just needs it to remain going the right way. Many styles of aps-c & non-full frame lenses can be used if they can use those styles of lenses to help them out. Or, the penultimate style which is a lab only created all red, blue, & green up conversion lens. Which gains more light at the cost of ir & or uv. Some are electrical, some are only ultra rare earth metal, some are a combo of light wave interference combined together to gain the needed light wave. All of these are made only in a lab, from what I can tell. If you know someone who can make it, go for it you (likely) won't be disappointed but it only gives you light back.
Teleconverters are needed for me, I shot with that canon powershot I have & kept looking at what the mm was I was needing for shots earlier today (they may & or may not, its often got issues being blurry & annoying to work on, most of my shots haven't been getting posted & I'm annoyed) & I routinely kept getting up to 1200mm, although it says 52x which is a little more but that's cropping & I'm fine with that.
Back to the problem of polar filters for these things, the longer the range the more polar filters make sense as light distorts less at times & haze becomes less, at times. Depending, that's good or bad. So much light lost! Dang it up conversion!
But, no I mean, wide angle 16-35 is massively different to non wide angle 35. & somehow, someway getting that needed extra is.... well almost impossible. F-theta will work, But comes at a cost of the wide angle needing to be wide enough to make a non-distortion increase & yet still be able to even not vignette & cause blurriness at the edges that makes everything suffer. Wide angle 16-35 has one major downside, the bottom & top are too dang much. Great for immensity vibes, terrible for the rest.
The only, as far as I know, way to beat that is going massive first lens like in the sigmas that have that, that tapers down to the needed size. Weight is... Well its brutal sometimes. I tend to tell people to lean into it, with a smaller (which means this is just what I've heard from actual professional people & I think they are right because they have shots backing it up) mm size & using the needed added on the threading glass to force it into not blurring, not distorting, & or giving you those where & when needed.
Like, 16mm & or 20mm or 35mm but its a slightly wider angle, meaning it has the distortion, but not much. The way to correct that is a tubed out wide angle macro that properly gains the needed light & or reduced blurring around the edges that they are looking for with, strangely, a suddenly not there distortion. Well decreased. Now, that's in smaller lenses that have you making them longer. It can be a serious pain. It takes distance & even larger sizes of glass to do it with lowered total values to get what you want, wide angle & or macro or both.
But that helps out with learning, I think too, to give you the shorter but much fatter glass you will use in the future for gaining framing, contrast, & dynamics in a picture when you get there later. I'm not there & I'm going to get there.
I dunno, I mean dude, trying to figure out how to make those mm changes is hard. Tubes fix asp-c, to a point but make it larger mm anyways, f-theta & fresnel to taper fiber to fresnel are the only ways I know to make it be a full frame without have mm change, but glass means more f stop reduce. Up conversion forces it back, but that is like fabled stuff. Labs have done it but, at least for me, I can't talk to someone for that even though I would pay them if they were open. Teleconverters work but just double things too. Front fresnel can work, if done correctly with the correct distance, the cost is decently added weight. All of it is hard. But its less weight that needing multiple lenses! I'll tell you that. I felt that pain of 6 & I'm complaining about the little I have right now.
Monopod, proper iso balance, choosing to lean into the issues to help it all force it to change to something else. A style that can be something desired. I just dislike blurry at times because it causes it to not gain the blurry I want when wanted. Light isn't coming from no where so, skill is what I'm aiming for for the teleconverter & sigma 60-600 with the needed polarpro chroma I prefer for longer shots around here. But I'm lying if I don't say I don't also want something like a fresnel or (maybe and or?) a f-theta to correct for it at distance by increasing light through increasing to size of the first lens. Just to brute force up to a shot I need/want to do/redo to make me have joy.
Thanks for the video, I appreciate it & you showing off its not uncool to go with the "yucky" higher f-stops. Which, look, yes I have also said too. My own personal discrimination side is full frame versus anything else. I think full frame is better always. No matter what I am not changing that, but I will contend that application is what it turns into & I am not going to care as long as you are happy & like what it does. But yeah. To be fair, I'm on a path of trying to get 8in x 10in full frame (its version I guess) large format sensors to happen for a extremely large picture to be walked towards & away from to have people enjoy tremendous detail, eventually getting a style of lenticular holographic pictures to allow for people to bend & move their heads to have all of that incredible captured life in one moment detail I want them to view & enjoy.
I call it a "God's perspective" style. You lean in and see all of the tiniest little things in the concrete & windows, trees & leaves, to the shirt that you then take our your jewelers microscope to see their name tag on for something they were doing that day & read it all while bending over to see they didn't perfectly shave their chin symmetrically all while getting to see the whole city as one large installation. I'll get there. But its a long time I'm fairly sure to do so.