My Camera Equpiment

While a few of you are familiar with what gear I use to take my photos - the vast majority are in the dark as this blog tends to focus on the pretty pictures and bird sightings rather than the technical photography aspect.  Well that's about to change - I'm going to expand the scope of this blog a little bit and try to include a little more detail on how the image was made for those who are interested.  Let's start with what I use in the field.

The one constant of course is the camera.  I started my foray into wildlife photography with Nikon's D60 DSLR (which has since been phased out) which was a nice starter camera that gave me full control but included some real user-friendly features that made jumping into the DSLR game easy.  It came with two kit lenses - the 18-55mm and the 55-200mm.  Both of these offered a nice range but fell well short of what I needed to photograph birds.  Anyone who is interested in starting photography on a more serious level would do well with these lenses but you will likely quickly outgrow them.  The 18-55mm is an excellent little lens for photographing things that don't move (like flowers) or people while the 55-200mm offered a nice range for some bigger birds (like egrets and herons) as well as allowing me to get a little closer to things like dragonflies and butterflies - but to photograph 90% of the birds out there, I needed something "bigger and better".  So I went out and purchased the...

Nikon D300s camera (linked below) which had just been released as an update to their D300 (the S stands for speed!).  Moving up to this camera allowed for more control and what every avian photographer covets - increased fps (frames per second).  With the D300s I can hold the shutter down and rip off 8 shots per second for a few seconds which really comes in handy when I'm photographing a bird in flight or trying to capture an egret catching a fish.

I paired this camera with the Nikon 300mm f/4.0D ED-IF AF-S Nikkor Lens which is plenty fast and tack sharp (both extremely important features).  This combo is good for shooting larger things like deer, seals or gulls that don't mind you getting close - but to get really close to the small warblers, sparrows and shorebirds I still needed more length, which is where Nikon TC-17E II (1.7x) Teleconverter AF-S, came in.  When matched with the 300 f4 lens, I now have 500mm of focal length to work with (and on the cropped sensor of the D300s we are working with a 750mm equivalent lens - not bad!).  The negative to this combo is it slows the autofocus a bit on the 300 f4 and lets in less light but it's an easy tradeoff when the other option is a 500mm lens which costs a whooping $6,000 more!