I heard about that, it's the light heating the glass and distorting it. You need to use an nd filter to cut it out. About 1 stop per 30 seconds ought to do it.
I've never noticed it and I've taken hundreds of long exposure / small aperture shots. I'd be looking at the tripod as the source of that before blaming the lens.
Me either and I'd never blame the lens for it. It would be something moving the camera (wind, unbalanced tripod etc) a small amount that would soften edges of the image.
I heard about that, it's the light heating the glass and distorting it. You need to use an nd filter to cut it out. About 1 stop per 30 seconds ought to do it.
I've never noticed it and I've taken hundreds of long exposure / small aperture shots. I'd be looking at the tripod as the source of that before blaming the lens.
Me either and I'd never blame the lens for it. It would be something moving the camera (wind, unbalanced tripod etc) a small amount that would soften edges of the image.
It's a natural behaviour of any lens from my experience though i didn't do any research on that subject. I have a few nd filters like ND 64 & ND 1000 to make really long exposures (several minutes for example) and i had this softening happening on many lenses. But you might be right, it could be vibrations on the tripod side. I always thought this was a physical aspect of the lens, i'll have to make "scientific" tests to draw a conclusion.
The only references I've found reference the softening of images, has to do with long lenses only... 'long lens distortion'. It's something you can't buy your way out of, it would affect the cheapest and most expensive lenses by the same degree.
Just to be sure, maybe I should say that I was completely taking the piss.
Length of exposure alone won't affect sharpness unless there is another factor involved, as has been said it will almost certainly be movement somewhere.