ALL PICTURES © GRAEME GREEN
Work i ng
with an
£11,000
lens
Heavyweight or just
a heavy weight?
Wildlife photographer
Graeme Green puts
a pro-spec 600mm
Canon lens to the test
in Tanzania’s Ruaha
National Park
sharpness, level of detail and richness of colour
that makes them a pleasure to look over at the
end of each day.
I’d been working towards a trip to remote
Ruaha National Park for several years, tipped
off by expert contacts that this is one of – if
not, the – greatest, wildest national park on the
continent. At 20,226km (around the same
size as Wales), it’s Tanzania’s largest national
park, yet also one of its least known. Named
after the Great Ruaha River that winds through
it, the sprawling wilderness is home to one
of the continent’s largest lion populations,
Tanzania’s largest elephant population, one of
the largest remaining cheetah populations and
574 species of birds, from marabou storks to
the endemic Ruaha hornbill.
Such a world-class wildlife location merits
a world-class lens. I arranged a loan of a
Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS II USM: a high-
magnifi cation, super-telephoto lens from
Canon’s professional L-series, designed for
sport and wildlife photography. Without a spare
£11,000 kicking around, I opted to hire the
lens for a couple of weeks, which set me back
£627. Would the photos I hoped to capture be
‘next level’ enough to justify such an expense?
First, I had to get the lens out to Tanzania. It’s
a big, chunky, tough-looking piece of kit, built
from magnesium and titanium, and dust- and
moisture-resistant – a good fi t for the hot,
humid, dusty and sometimes rainy conditions
of East Africa’s national parks.
The lens arrived the day before my trip in
a giant protective case that would be hugely
impractical to transport to Africa. Instead, I
wrapped it in thick bubble wrap for protection
and secured it in its own backpack.Travelling with a brute
As a professional photographer and journalist,
I travel frequently for work. My kit bag usually
contains two camera bodies, a Canon and a
Sony, along with three lenses, including a
Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM
that usually covers my wildlife photography
needs. Add to all that a tripod, a set of LEE
Filters, a handful of batteries, chargers,
memory cards, external hard drives and
a MacBook, and my gear usually weighs
around 8-10kg. Carrying an additional 4-5kg
backpack made getting through the airport,
especially security queues, arduous work. Of
course, security staff at each stage also wanted
to inspect the lens, which was understandable,
given that it looked like I was in possession of
an air-to-ground rocket launcher.
There’s also the extra cost of travelling with
so much weight; you need to pay for extra
baggage allowance on international fl ights
and domestic fl ights into the national park.
That was all soon forgotten, though, as the
little 14-seater plane from Dar es Salaam
came into land at Ruaha’s Jongomero airstrip
and I spotted elephants and impala sheltering
from the sun under acacia trees. Clearly,
fi nding and photographing wildlife here
was not going to be a problem.Graeme Green at work with the Canon
EF 600mm f/4L IS II USM mounted
to his Sony A7 III© ANDREA MORENO