African Wildlife & Environment Issue 74

To add life to the picture watch for interesting behaviour and capture the eye clearly

How do you start? What is your end-goal, and how much do you want to spend on equipment? Let’s start with the possible goals: • Do you want to take photographs as part of your birding or nature experience? • Will you be carrying your equipment around when birding in the bush? • Do you want pictures mainly to use on Facebook and to share with friends? • Would you like to go commercial, illustrating magazines and bird books? • Do you want to make large prints for display, or to share with friends? The last two goals will most likely be the aspirations of experienced photographers and we will leave

those for another time and another article in our magazine. The first three goals allow one a lot of flexibility and you can fit a limited budget more easily in meeting these goals. With the most basic or entry level Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras you can get great results with the correct lenses. ‘Bridge cameras’ will usually and adequately meet goal number three, but they don’t have interchangeable lenses – they have impressive ‘zoom’ capabilities, at the expense of high resolution. The minimum lens size for successful bird photography is normally a 400 mm lens (which could also be a good quality 300mm lens with a 1.4 x tele- converter). When used on a non-full frame camera you get a compensation of 1.5 or 1.6 on your 400 mm lens, making the lens effectively a 640 mm model.

27 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 74 (2019)