Hi,
Well, well, it seems yesterday _two_ new Dutchmen discovered the list! Just
out of interest: was this list mentioned to you guys by another Dutch list
member, or did you find it coincidentially?
Anyway: welkom op de lijst!
Wild bird photography is one the most difficult and challenging tasks in
photography. Most birds are just too small, too quick and too scary to be
captured even with the longest lenses. Professional bird photographers use
camouflage tents, with lenses in the 200 - 600mm range and a shooting
distance of only a couple of meters (10 meters at the most).
This is absolutely true, I too was very dissapointed to see that birds are
still showing up very small when using the 300mm lens. Even when adding the
2x teleconverter the birds don't show up very big, and it becomes
increasingly more difficult to actually find the bird in your viewfinder
using such focal lengths.
If you have the patience/time/means to stalk birds for a long time, I'd
suggest getting something in the 300mm-1000mm range and trying that out. If
you don't have the patience/time you'll soon be dissapointed with this type
of photography I fear (I, for one person, am not doing anything with this
type of photography at present, even though this is what as a kid I wanted
to have a camera for!).
A further issue is that most of the lenses in this range are hard to find
and very expensive. A pretty ideal combination would be the 350/2.8 + 1.4xA
(or 2xA), but this is an extremely rare and expensive combination (note: I
missed your original post so I'm not sure if you made any mention of a
specific amount of money you had in mind, but seeing the fact that in
today's digest (up till now, that is) no one else seems to have made mention
of this combination, I guess you did mention something about that). Then,
the 300/4.5 was mentioned by several people, I too agree that that is a very
nice starting lens. It weighs roughly 1 KG and is a tad heavy to handhold,
but with fast film it can be done. Nonetheless, it's best to use this lens
on a tripod, especially when combining it with a teleconverter. My personal
results with using the 300/4.5 + 2xA were not that great, but I've read here
that other list members did get pretty good results when stopping down a
step or two and when using a solid(!) tripod.
Either way, I found one suggestion to be inspiring: taking a picture with a
high-quality lens (which the 300/4.5 certainly is) and then cropping it. An
intriguing way to do this would be to shoot the picture with the 300/4.5 on
high resolution slide film, and then use the slide copier (note: this
requires a bellows, a slide copier, and a macro lens so you may not be
interested in this, but for the ones who do have such equipment it's
probably a good way to go about getting frame filling pictures) to make a
duplicate of a part of the slide.
If interested in finding out more about this, I suggest you'd contact our
fellow Dutchman Erwin Voogt (who is experimenting with slide duplication and
can tell you a lot about it). He tends to read the digests too (though not
always), but if so desired, mail me off-list (olaf_greve@xxxxxxxxxxx) and
I'll pass his personal e-mail address.
Alright, I hope this message is of any use. I guess I didn't write any new
revelations, but at least you'll have heard another vote for the 300/4.5 in
combiantion with a lot of patience and/or cropping! :)
Cheers!
Olafo
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