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Beginning
Soon after marking one year of my wildlife photography experience I made pretty significant upgrade to my gear and processing pipeline, creating solid Pro setup to move forward with my photography goals.
One year ago I started with Nikon Z fc APS-C camera 50-250mm lens, later moving to 150-500mm lens. While my camera was great for casual and tourist photography it was missing few key features, which are very important for wildlife photography: subject detection for wild animals and birds, weather proof sealing, pre-capture, fast shutter speed and full frame sensor. However, APS-C format has one big advantage vs full frame format - 1.5x reach on same lenses, which let to be closer to distant subjects which is very important in wildlife photography. Generally, starting from this camera was a great way to learn basics and understand limitations as well as understand if wildlife photography is what I like and want move forward with it.
Moving to full frame Nikon Z f and Nikkor 180-600mm lens was a big update which allowed to significantly improve possibilities in making photos. Full frame allowed to make photos in wider range of weather/lighting conditions. Advanced subject detection allowed to capture sharper photos. Weather sealing made possible to shoot in rainy days which are quite common in Ireland. pre-capture and fast shutter speed allowed to start capturing flight shots, even for such fast moving birds like kingfisher.
Also I briefly tested Nikon's latest APS-C model, Nikon Z 50II, which is a great beginner's camera for wildlife photographers with sophisticated AI AF for birds and animals and pre-capture features!
New setup
And finally I was able to make the big move, transitioning to Pro models for both camera and lens, Nikon Z8 and Nikkor 400mm F4.5. Why these models and what features I was looking for?
Z8 offers pretty much all features of Z9, Nikon's flagship camera. 45mp sensor allowing to shoot object and further distances, effectively increasing reach to ~1.4x vs Nikon Z f. Stacked sensor significantly increases auto focus performance. Bird AI auto focus detects subjects in most challenges situations, including fast movement and flight. 20fps RAW and up to 120fps JPEG burst rates allowing to capture every moment in fast moving scenes. There are many more features which even further improves possibilities to capture photos most challenging conditions.
Now with lens. 600mm lenses are very common in wildlife photography, providing excellent reach. However majority of these lenses, except very expensive top lenses have 6.3 or smaller aperture, limiting light for the photos, particularly when using fast shutter speed. For example, photo-shooting sharp in-flight photos of kingfisher requires at least 1/5000s shutter speed! That is about 1/10 of light vs "usual" conditions for static scenes. That requires to use higher ISO settings what results in lower details. So, moving to lens with high aperture was one of the criteria. As well as moving to a prime. Zoom lenses have advantage of variable zoom, allowing to photoshoot from one position and adjust zoom when required. But, prime lenses offer much sharper images and faster auto focus. Both these features are way more important than the zooming convenience. With all of that and taking price into account I selected Nikkor 400mm F4.5. It has smaller reach, but with 45mp sensor I still have quite a big room for photo-shooting distant subjects as well by adding 1.4x TC when required I will get 600mm at F6.3 as previously. Additionally, this lens is very compact and light, simplifying carrying and handheld photo-shooting.
Finally, after moving to a new hardware setup I've started to use desktop versions of Lightroom and Pixelmator Pro software, which offers move features for post-processing.
With this new setup, carefully planned and chosen for the specific features and capabilities, I'm looking forward to be able to capture new photos and improve my skills and the resulted quality.
First examples
