Will it do the job?

[cheersm8]

Hi all,
I presently do a bit of bird photography and insect macro photography.
I'm no pro, but it's fun and a brilliant way to spend a few hours and makes a real change from hide sitting and watching waders through a scope.
Currently, my bird photography is via the digiscope scope/compact camera method, and, OK I've had some pleasing and acceptable ( for me ) results.
My macro photography is via an 'almost dslr' with macro lenses and I'm 100% happy with the results I get.
I'm itching to take my bird photography onto another level via DSLR and tele lens.
Before I spend the money there is one grey area I would like opinions on.
My budget will allow me to buy a DSLR and a 400mm tele lens.
The lens I can afford is only of 'sigma' quality/range and thus I expect I'm looking at f 5 ( ish ) top speed.
Question is, Will 400mm ( without added conversion lenses ) be adequate enough to photograph birds and/or other wildlife up to a range of 20 meters and still 'crop out' the subject ( to my tastes ) and preserve detail ( within the limits of the optics my budget allows )?
I'm not talking 'crop factor' which you purists hate being called 'magnification'.

[AC/DC]

Hi,

If the bird is a reasonable size (bigger than a woodpigeon), then you should be OK @ 20 metres. Unfortunately, being able to crop in well is a trait of higher quality lenses. The closer you are the better!
What exactly is your budget? If you can stretch to the something like the Canon 400 f/5.6L, from which you can get sharp 100% crops, then you will probably have a better success rate of shots at 20 metres.
I suppose a camera with a larger amount of megapixels (EOS 50D?) will help too.

[RAH]

I'm not talking 'crop factor' which you purists hate being called 'magnification'.
Yes, they hate it being called magnification, so we won't, but it is a factor that you need to consider. I'd say that 400mm on a film SLR or a full-frame DSLR is just about bare minimum for bird pictures. On a 1.5 or 1.6 crop-factor camera, it gives you about the equivalent of 600mm, which is adequate. With the Olympus 4/3 DSLRs, it gives you 800mm equivalence, which is very nice.

[cheersm8]

Thanks for the replies. Now I'm having a rethink. I don't want to purchase a 400mm lens and find myself struggling, and I'm not happy about using teleconverters. ( used them on old SLR cameras and the IQ was rubbish )
looks like I'll probably save up a bit more and look for a 'used' 600mm.
My original budget was £800 tops, and I've been lucky to find a 'body only' EOS 350D which I bought for £150, so my lens budgets now stands at £650 without adding any more to the pot.

[Fozzybear]

What I'm about to write is purely from my personal experience and would likely go against what 'real' bird photographers use. I am not a pro, I don't pretend to be a pro, but I think I get reasonable results from shorter lenses and thought I'd post the following purely for perspective, just to give cheersm8 an idea of how shorter lenses stack up...

Although a BIG lens is a real help you might want to be sure that's what you really need for the way you intend to photograph. For the best quality a good 500 or 600mm prime is the best choice and will give real light-gathering power too. That said, I actually use a 70-300mm zoom for a lot of my bird photos and it works reasonably well but does need cropping in, sometimes fairly hard... I guess it depends on your demands and the birds you're photographing really. If you really NEED full frame results of the very highest quality then even a 600mm is possibly just about ok, but if you are looking for reasonable results that are a step up from digiscoping then you may find that you don't actually need such a big lens.

My brother uses a 400mm f/5.6 on a Canon EOS 5D MkII (a full-frame camera) and has got amazing results with it, so a 400mm on a regular DSLR would work pretty well. I've used a 300mm prime with 1.4x teleconverter on my Nikon and have been really pleased with the results, but if you are photographing waders at a quarter of a mile then neither would get you anything like close enough! If you use a scope you'll be used to lugging around big kit but I find that as I do a lot of photography while walking a smaller, light lens is much more practical and easier to use for birds in flight.

I think in all likelihood you'll probably be better off with a good sized prime judging by the way you worded your posts, but I thought I'd give you another option to think about. I certainly wouldn't buy a short tele like my Nikon 70-300VR if I shot mostly from hides at reservoirs and the like as it's much, much too short, but ok for closish birds. The three shots I've attached were all shot using a Nikon D300 and the Nikon 70-300 VR zoom (image stabilised) in Norfolk recently - a prime would give higher quality than this lens, it doesn't have the detail capturing ability of a prime but the VR is certainly useful for handholding (most of my shots are taken handheld). Hopefully this might show what you can do with a shorter lens so give you an idea of how the shorter telephotos stacks up.

The Marsh Harrier and Reed Bunting were taken when out walking on foot, the Avocet was taken from a hide... not sure of the distances, I cropped in on all three shots though.

[tjsimonsen]

Hi, No matter what you choose, you will likely wish for a different lens quite a bit of the time. A 400 might be short quite a bit of the time, but a 600/4 would probably be too heavy and unhandy much of the time too.

As Fuzzybear said, a 70-300 can quite often give you decent shots. I used a Sigma APO 70-300mm with an EOS 50 before I went digital. Which means that I didn't even have the crop factor to narrow down the angle of view. Still I think that I got some decent pics with the setup (remember that these are scans from film which further degrades the IQ a bit):

http://www.pbase.com/tjsimonsen/image/88439696
http://www.pbase.com/tjsimonsen/image/87452350
http://www.pbase.com/tjsimonsen/image/86782634
http://www.pbase.com/tjsimonsen/image/86310105

It does help to be close to the subject, but the pelican in the 3rd pic was some distance away.

Now I use a 40D and an EF100-400L IS. Is it better? Oh yes! Is it worth the price difference? To me it certainly is, but not only because of the (indisputably) better IQ it delivers. The joy of using considerably better built equipment also comes into the equation.

Thomas

[AC/DC]

I saw this pigeon in the back garden and thought of this thread, so took a quick snap. The lens said about 17 metres away.
Unfortunately the reflective garage roof induced a fair bit of haze, reducing the sharpness quite a bit:
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/2244/85456259.jpg

Now I have had a go myself, I can more confidently say that with a bird of reasonable size, below 20 metres you should be fine with a 400mm.

Hope that helps.

[cheersm8]

Well Fozzybear and Thomas. What an eye opener, and a brilliant result for my original query!
Most of my bird photogtaphy is done 'on the fly', I'm not one for sitting in hides digiscoping waders. Sitting and looking at them with scope and bins is fine, especially when it's raining. At the moment, I do my bird photography while mooching about and taking pics when opportunity arises, and doing this while dragging a scope, tripod and the digiscope attachment parphenalia with me does make a tiresome walk.
Odd thing is, I would say that 90% of the pics I shoot with my digiscope set up are of birds that are almost close enough to spit on anyway.
So, I'll be on the hunt for a half decent lens of 400 - 600mm and look forward to more leisurely walks around my local fens and woods with only my bins, macro camera in my backpack, and camera and tele lens round my neck.

Thanks to everyone for all of the positive and very helpful input.

Steve: the woody pics are interesting, and enlightening. Thats exactly how my digiscope shots are, with the same cropping required, except for one thing. The digiscoped images are not a patch on yours taken with DSLR and lens. And I bet that your camera taken ones were a lot less fiddly to take than any of my digiscoped efforts.
I know that lots of the digiscope enthusiasts would not agree, but I have yet to see a digiscoped image that is anywhere near the IQ of traditional DSLR/tele lens photo's, even 100% cropped ones. Thats not knocking digiscoping. It's great fun, and extremely useful as an identification aid when joined with written descriptions etc.

[AC/DC]

Yeah, not fiddly at all - took a few seconds. If you were wondering that funny black stuff in the corner is just some OOF foliage of a plant.
As for digiscoping, I have seen some fab results with astro scopes - but they're not for my style of photography. A year or two ago, £650 would have just about got a 400 f/5.6L new. Due to price increases though, you'll be lucky to get one 2ndhand for that now. You never know though, a fair few have gone up for sale here on BF recently.

[Fozzybear]

Yeah, my brother was looking at the 400mm when he got his 5D but by the time he came around to buy one it had gone up quite a few hundred quid!