@Steve , if I may ask you, where exactly in Bots you've been? According to the Elephant photos you were on Pangolin boat, right? And where in Okavango? In Khwai with Pangolin- Partner? (I think the Lodge name is something like Bushman Plains or something like this). Where can I see the photographs? Was 600mm not too long for Okavango? I assume you took it because of DOF (subject vs background separation)? And because you could use it for both: birds and animals? I am asking becasue normally 600mm is too long for the animals in Okavango: they come close, sometimes very close and in private concession you can off-road. I saw people were struggling with 600mm primes... Normally photographers are using 400mm and 70-200mm.
We were with Pangolin and at a camp called "Selinda' (I'm probably spelling that wrong).
As for lenses, you'd be surprised how often I used a 2X with that 600mm - in both places. For smaller birds and some mammals, it's the 600mm + TC(s) proved essential (on both my trips there). Even for hippos and such when they are just in the water. Sure, there were times it was too long and I suspect I'd be ever so slightly happier with a 400mm + TC as needed, but I was able to make it work for the most part - and when it was too long, I just grabbed the 100-400.
In addition, most of our group was using longer glass, so I just had the boats / trucks park at distances that worked. In fact, although you can get close to wildlife from the trucks in the Okavango concessions, I make it a point to try to discourage that with our driver. The thing is, the closer you are to an animal, the more it looks like you are shooting down on it and it ruins the shot. I'd rather be back farther with a longer lens so the shot appears more like it's at eye-level.
Finally, in my experience, most people are far too dependent on cropping and shots where they think they are "close enough" really aren't. They are so accustomed to grabbing the crop tool to finish the composition on the computer that they've lost the ability to really fill the frame properly in the field (and most don't realize it, either). I don't fall into that category (
) so I'm very comfortable with tighter shots. You'll see a bunch of them in my upcoming Sony a1 review.
I also sometimes think it's cool to do super-tight crops to get something different than the typical shot.
Below are a few examples:
This is a good example of an animal properly filling the frame. Most people would say this is too close if they saw an animal filling up the viewfinder like this since the baboon was moving, but the truth is, it filled the frame nicely.
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This one was at 840mm and still required an APS-C crop. I didn't use a 2X due to the slow shutter speed:
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This is a really endangered African skimmer chick. Again, this is about an APS-C crop and I shot it at close range with 1200mm!!
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For this one, the 600mm was handy. The hippo had an awful background and the tight crop is quite dramatic IMO:
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Finally, we had a lion settle in right next to the vehicle so I decided to have some fun. This was at 1200mm and I did take a little bit of an artistic license with the processing.
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