In the past the Nikon 300mm f/4D lens was my favourite lens for my animal and bird photography but with the passage of time things are changing. Don’t get me wrong the 300mm f/4D lens is still great, but occasionally it was not quite enough. Since using the new Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 lens it is slowly becoming my new favourite. I still really like the f/4 lens in low light conditions but for bird photography the additional 200mm reach of the 200-500mm lens is the decider.
When I am using the Nikon D810 camera for birds I am finding that I can crop the images by a factor of x1.5, this can not be so readily done for landscape images as the full number of pixels is generally needed. With the cropping to a factor of x1.5 when taking bird images the 200-500mm lens effectively becomes a 300-750mm which is so great for many of the smaller birds such as finches and small wrens.
I am also finding that for some closely cropped landscapes, the 200-500mm f/5.6 lens is very good to select a small portion of the landscape to give much more impact to the image.
See my Bird Gallery.
All four images above have been captured with the 200-500mm lens.