The 300mm was longer than any lens I'd owned. And it was physically larger than anything I'd ever carried, too. But it was worth it. The first time I used it, during a prep football game in Incline Village, Nevada, with Lake Tahoe visible a couple of miles away, I got the best football pictures I'd taken up to that point in my life. 300mm can get you close the most of the action on a football field, if you're on the sidelines, and the fairly bright sun that day let me use 400 ASA Tri-X at 1/500th and somewhere around f8, handheld.

Since then, I've used this old 300mm lens for baseball, Colorado mountain scenics, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and many other subjects.

Truth be told, though, I don't use it much these days. When you use lenses that long, you really need to use a tripod - something I don't use as often as I should. Personally, I prefer walking closer to my subject if possible. I don't shoot sports anymore (though now that I think about it, the last sports shot I had published - in the late 1990's - was taken with my ancient 300mm f4.5).

Because of this lens' bulk and weight (which really is quite reasonable compared to anything faster at this focal length), I rarely carry it anymore. The couple of times I desperately needed a 300mm recently, I didn't have it with me - for example, when a light plane crashed into East Grand Traverse Bay 400 yards from shore at dusk. I'd have loved to use my 300mm then, but all I could get my hands on was the newsroom's generic 80-200mm zoom on a Pentax K1000. So I shot away, souped the film, and got a usable shot of rescue workers trying to right the plane shortly after sunset (no one was injured). The picture ran four columns wide in the next day's edition. If I'd had it with me that day, the 300mm would have resulted in a more dramatic shot.

Back in the 1970s, when I was still in college, the Nikkor 300mm f4.5 was a common lens for photojournalists to use as their long telephoto. Nowadays, professionals use the much sharper, and faster, and bulkier, and heavier, and more expensive, Nikkor 300mm f2.8. Digital photojournalists (which is virtually all of the pros as of 2004) use an 80-200mm f2.8, which (because of the 1.5X multiplication factor of the popular digital SLRs) has an effective equivalent top end of 300mm in traditional 35mm language. Without a doubt, those are both much better lenses in optical quality than my ancient f4.5. But most amateurs have a hard time justifying spending $3000 on a used lens (the f2.8) or maybe even $800 (an new 80-200mm f2.8 AF Nikkor).

I bought my 300mm f4.5 in 1982 for $300. You frequently see them on eBay these days for around $150. The f4.5 is still a perfectly useable lens. But times have changed, and for about the same money, you can probably pick up a used Nikkor 70-300mm f4-5.6, which will most likely give you optically superior results.