Avoiding the $8,500 shock

Those of us who like to hunt wildlife with a camera know that you can never have enough mm of lens. But sticker shock kicks in when you look at the prices for a fast super-telephoto lens. Last year I made it a high priority to seek out an alternative way to acquire one of these highly sought after gems and ended up with a prized lens at a bargain basement price.

My lucky catch doesn’t have the features of late model glass, but neither does it doesn’t carry an $8,500 price tag. Instead of the a brand spanking new 400mm f/2.8 with auto focusing and vibration reduction I picked up a used 400mm f/3.5 manual focus lens. As you’ll see, although it lacks the convenience of the high price spread, it performs very well for my type of shooting. And at a price of about $600, it is a steal. If you’re a lover of long lenses that isn’t willing to take a mortgage out to buy one, follow along to see if the used lens approach can satisfy your equipment wants.

To be exact, my “find” is a Nikkor ED IF AI-S 400mm f/3.5 lens. There are no marks or scratches on any of the lens surfaces. The lens body shows heavy wear and a few scratches to the paint. It has a tripod collar, a built-in lens hood and accepts affordable 39mm drop-in filters or expensive very 122mm external filters. Mechanically, this lens has high quality optics; manual internal focusing (lens barrel does not extend or retract as it is focused) and automatic indexing so that the camera can determine the aperture setting.
To try out the lens, I mounted it on a Nikon D600 body. Notice the white dot on the lens.	Simply line up the white dot on the lens with the white dot on the camera body and twist counter-clockwise.
This monster of a lens weighs more than 6 pounds. You won’t want to handhold this camera and lens combo for very long. While it is possible to mount this combo directly onto a tripod, a more practical solution is to use a gimbal mount. Here’s one that I use.
Using the tripod collar on the lens, the combo is screwed onto the gimbal. The gimbal itself is mounted and balanced onto the tripod. With the arrangement, you can now frictionlessly tilt, swivel and pan the camera and lens combo to take aim of your subject.
There’s one final step to complete before we can use this older lens with a newer camera body. Newer Nikkor lenses owe their intelligence to a tiny CPU which controls the exposure settings. Since this lens does not have a CPU, you must “register” this lens to the camera by setting its maximum (widest) aperture. The Tools menu has an item for doing this.
Having registered the lens, there are two options for setting the exposure: ‘M” manual, where you set both the shutter speed and aperture or “A” aperture priority, where you set the aperture and the camera sets the appropriate shutter speed. In either case, you rotate the aperture ring on the lens to the desired lens opening. In “M” mode, you also dial in the camera shutter speed. In “A” mode, the camera automatically sets the shutter speed. You’re all set to take aim, carefully focus and fire away. Here’s a few of my first shots with the lens.
This photo is a full frame capture of a colorful duck. The lens’ large focusing ring lets me easily bring things into sharp focus.	To give you an idea of the quality of the lens, this is an enlargement of the duck’s head taken from the photo on the left.
How sharp is this lens? Full frame shot at f/5.6.	The enlargement here looks pretty sharp to me.
In this comparison of the same capture at f/3.5 and f/5.6 you’ll see a noticeable drop in sharpness when using the widest opening. The lesson for me: stop down to achieve the sharpest photographs.

At first I was a little hesitant about buying an older lens without the autofocus and autoexposure features that I’ve come to expect from newer lenses. After all, this lens comes from the early 1980s; isn’t it obsolete? Now that I’ve had some positive experience, I realize that quality equipment lasts for many years.

I feel that I hit the jackpot with this lens at a great price. Now I’m hoping to find some time to capture many more birds in the future.
 
 
 
Written by Arnie Lee
 
 
NOTE: While this article featured Nikon equipment, I’m hoping to look for similar money-saving angles for my Canon equipment.
 
 

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Earth Day “it’s for the birds”… and us too

Today is Earth Day. I’m guessing that many of you haven’t a clue as to what it’s about. Maybe you can get a glint of Earth Day here.

I recently completed writing what has become an annual article about Earth Day. Yesterday morning as I was having coffee and reading the Sunday NY Times, I was quite surprised that I didn’t find a single mention of Earth Day throughout the entire newspaper. But I did run across an interesting article that has a similar theme. As a lover of the outdoors, I’m an avid participant in nature photography. Having spent more than five decades with camera-in-hand, I’ve collected my share of wildlife images. Along the way, I’ve found that the most challenging parts of this favorite activity is capturing the varying graceful, delicate or powerful movements of birds in flight.

Yes, I like birds but I don’t consider myself a bird-watcher. Yet according to Brian Kimberling[1], there are some 5.8 million bird-watchers in the US. I’m not sure where he derives this number but his mention of The Audubon Society most likely accounts for a good share of them.

Last December amid our holiday festivities, I recall hearing about the start of Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count. During a two week period, participants take a census of birds in their geographic area with a main goal of studying how bird populations have changed in time and space. After reading Kimberling’s article, I have a better understanding of what these studies are telling us about the environment of all the non-bird species, i.e. us humans.

According the Audubon Society’s report, there has been a noticeable change in bird migration in recent years. The report says: we were able to look at the winter distribution of 305 species to see if their winter range had shifted over the last 40 years. We discovered that 177 of these species showed a significant shift north and this northward shift was correlated with an increase in mean January temperatures in the contiguous 48 states of almost 5 degrees during that time. You can find more details on the Audubon’s website.

Five degrees in 40 years. This is a pretty large increase within the lifetime of many of us. Obviously it’s a big deal to the habits of the birds.

Shouldn’t we be concerned? What do you think? I’d like to hear from you.

Written by Arnie Lee

[1]”What Do Birders Know”, NY Times Sunday Review Section, April 21, 2013

 

 

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You May Be Pleasantly Surprised By What You See

 

One of our granddaughters has been interested in picturetaking for a several years. Ezra who is eight years old is now on her second camera – her first camera was a low-cost point-and-shoot model but it didn’t quite survive a washing machine cleaning. So now she’s using a “tough” model that claims to be shockproof, waterproof and freezeproof.

Not long ago, she asked me to copy the pictures from her camera and recharge the battery. As I was copying the images from the SD card, I realized that these were photos that she had taken months ago. The earliest ones dated back to last summer’s vacation, a few other road trips and other events since then.

I studied the more than three hundred of her thumbnails. Frankly, I came away quite impressed with many of her photos. They showed her ability to pick varied subjects, frame carefully from her lowered point of view (she’s about 40″ tall) and snap at an interesting time.

I thought it would be helpful if I picked a few dozen of her photos to show to you with an quick explanation of when and/or where they were taken (as far as I can remember). For the most part the photos are unretouched with some cropping.

Without further ado, here are some of the “Best of Ezra”

On one of the school outings, her class visited a nature preserve. Here’s some of the flora that she caught her attention.	It looks as if Ezra also caught this yellowjacket sucking nectar from the flowers.
At an art festival she apparently liked the metal horse sculpture racing in the river.	This is another display of artfully decorated eggshells
After viewing the eggshells, Ezra talked to and photographed the artist.	This artist was apparently tired after talking to Ezra and other patrons for hours on end. Ezra captured her stealing a little rest.
One of the stops on our summer vacation was in Yellowstone National Park. This is one of the bubbling geyers in the north end of the park.	And you can see that tiny details don’t escape her either.
I’m surprised that the squirrel allowed her to get so close to her. She took five other photos at this close range too.	During play, she stopped to take a picture of her younger sister’s bedroom.
Inside she wanted a closeup of the standing guitar.	Here’s one of Ezra’s schoolmates. She frequently takes her camera to school to records the class trips.
This is one way for her to record a drawing that she enjoyed creating.	It was fun for her to photograph her sister’s feet.
…Or the other way – keep your head pointed upward.	Sometimes it’s interesting to keep your head pointed downward.
This picture shows that she’s keenly aware of the change of seasons.	On a cross-country trip we first stopped in Mesa Verde where she saw this mule deer grazing by the roadside.
Bright flowers nearby in southwestern Colorado.	At the Native American museum in Tuba City, AZ.
As you can see below, Ezra really put her camera to work in the Grand Canyon.
Grandpa	Grandma

 

Ezra has promised to take good care of the camera. It’s an Olympus Model 6020 and is very rugged. It’s been dropped many times and just like the advertisements claim – it remains fully operational.

And as you can see, an eight year old is fully capable of capturing memorable images. Give the kid a camera!

 

Written by Arnie Lee

 

 

 

 

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