Outdoor Photography

February 2018 Outdoor Photography 79

Nature tips

To answer quest ions such as how many

megapixels we need, or how much to sp end on

lenses, we fi rst need to ask ourselves exact ly

what it is we want to do with our photographs.

Traditionally, professional photographers have

a ‘no-compromise’ approach when it comes to

choosing equipment, because they need the

biggest and ‘best ’ fi les to cope with any use

that may be asked of their images. It certainly

isn’t a bad st ance for any photographer to take,

but I think that even professionals are now

looking carefully at each new development

and thinking twice about whether the

incremental improvements just ify the expense

of continually upgrading their equipment.

If your needs are more modest , it is even more

diffi cult to just ify upgrading for the sake of it.

An upside to all this is that there is a

continual supply of barely used equipment

available for sale on the secondhand market,

which has been traded-in while there is st ill

plenty of life left in it. I don’t mind admitt ing

that I st ill use a Nikon D3X body, purchased

secondhand more than seven years ago.

Desp ite a couple of limitations regarding

its high ISO performance and the capture

rate when shooting Raw, I use it whenever

I can and shoot at least 60% of my work with

it. When it becomes uneconomic to repair

I will think about buying into the Nikon D800

series bodies, but for the time being 24.5MP

is more than enough for everything I need it to

do. Regardless of brand, I am sure there are

similar parallels to be found elsewhere.

If you have a limited budget to st art with, take

a long-term view and sp end as much as you

can aff ord on building-up a syst em of quality

kit, st arting with the essentials. Buying pro-

build quality means durability and longevity.

Two of my three most -used lenses – the Nikkor

17-35mm f/2.8 and Nikkor 200mm f/4 macro

• were both purchased new around 20 years
  ago. The fact that both are st ill available new
  today is test ament to their reputation, and
  unless any signifi cant upgrades come along
  I would be happy to replace them with pre-
  owned copies that would probably cost less
  than those I have now. Call it recycling.

Above This grey heron is perched in a tree close to its nest , around 12m off the ground. I photographed it

using a pre-owned Nikon 600mm f/5.6 manual focus lens in the early 1980s. This was my fi rst high-quality

long lens and was probably fundamental to kick-st arting my career. I owned and used it for over 14 years,

and lenses like this are st ill available secondhand today.

Nikon F3 with Nikon 600mm f/5.6 manual focus lens, Kodachrome ISO 64 fi lm, 1/250sec at f/5.6,

tripod, cable release, treetop hide

photograph the whole gamut of subjects

in nature, so the main priority for bird and

mammal photographers, for example, is to invest

in a long lens of at least 300mm on a cropped-

sensor camera or 400mm for a full-frame one.

As technology has advanced, many high-

end long lenses have become more complex

and increasingly expensive to produce, and so

prohibitive for many photographers. At one time,

wide-aperture lenses such as a 300mm f/2.8 were

more desirable than the 300mm f/4 versions

because of the restrictions of using low ISO fi lms.

The diff erence in cost and weight between the

two was – and still is – considerable, but it was a

price worth paying for gaining one extra f/stop.

Today, however, digital cameras perform so well at

high ISO settings that there is less need to spend

as much, unless you wish to add teleconverters

to those wide-aperture telephoto lenses.

There are many other examples where the

gains made since the advent of digital capture

have benefi ted nature photographers, but if for

no other reason than to avoid the excesses of

unsustainable consumerism, should we now

be asking ourselves just how much more we

really need and how high we should be setting

the bar regarding ‘what is good enough’? The

photograph from the young photographer that

I saw in the exhibition that day endorsed the

notion I’ve held for some time that we really

don’t need much to get by.

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