What lens should I use for wildlife photography?

I see this question come up frequently in various forums, and usually, it’s someone wanting to try and use a short focal length lens for wildlife. In one forum, someone in the Nikon mirrorless universe was thinking about either getting the Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 lens or the Z 70-200 f/2.8 lens with the Z 2X TC. The discussion got into using lenses with higher aperture numbers and the issues that follow. Instead of answering this question multiple times, a reference post for future questions seems in order.

In my experience as a wildlife photographer, I’ve found that there will be circumstances where you want a short telephoto lens, but this is the exception and not the norm. For instance, on my brown bear trip to Alaska, while in Lake Clark National Park, there were times that 700-pound bears would come within 20-30 feet of us. With a large animal at that range, even 70mm felt close.

Close up of an Alaskan coastal brown bear.
At 500mm, this bear was so close, all I could get was a head.

But few people will have a large mammal come that close to them, and in best practices, you should stay 50-100 yards away, and in many places, rules prohibit photographers from approaching any closer to dangerous animals. Even for less dangerous animals like deer, getting any closer will spook them and you won’t be able to get the shot anyway.

Many wildlife photographers try to cover birds, or small animals they come across. More common birds are quite small and quite shy. You probably won’t get very close, unless you have feeders. Larger birds like eagles or osprey, also tend to avoid people.

An Alaskan coastal brown bear at a distance.
This is a bit more typical, here 200mm wasn’t nearly enough for a bear 30 yards away.

You need a long telephoto lens.

400mm should be considered the shortest lens that a wildlife photographer should consider. Note: these lens sizes assume a full-frame/35mm film-sized sensor. If you’re shooting an APS-C sized or crop sensor (DX in Nikon terms), you need to divide these numbers by 2/3. That is a 300mm lens for full frame is the same framing as a 200mm lens on APS-C/crop sensor cameras. Frequently you’re going to need to be more. 600mm and 800mm are common focal lengths carried by professional wildlife photographers, and even then they may be adding teleconverters to get more reach.

Red-bellied woodpecker on the side of a tree, uncropped is barely visible.
Even at 500mm, this red-bellied woodpecker is just too small in the frame. The same photo on the right is cropped to a presentable size for web use with a high-megapixel camera. On a typical 24mp camera, this would likely be unusable.
The same red-bellied woodpecker after cropping.

One exception, which may technically not be wildlife photography, but which many people enjoy is Zoo photography. With some exhibits, you may find 50-70mm appropriate like elephants close to where you can stand, but other times, you may find 500mm not enough. Generally speaking, a 100-400mm would be a solid lens for Zoo visits, in particular, if you have enough resolution to do some cropping.

If you’re looking into wildlife and birding, set your sites on 400mm+ as the minimum. That said, having coverage for the 70-400mm range is quite useful for those exception times.

Three giraffes walking together
210mm was just right for this photo of Giraffes at the NC Zoo.

Importance of aperture

Now on to aperture. “Why is that important?” you might be asking.

Wildlife is more active during early morning and early evening times. These are times of the day when there isn’t a lot of light. You are also using long telephoto lenses. While many lenses and mirrorless cameras have image stabilization it’s not always helpful, so you still need to consider the minimum handholding reciprocal rule. That is the minimum shutter speed that the average person can handhold is 1 / focal length. Image stabilization (IS) or vibration reduction (VR) changes this, but only partially. IS or VR only helps with your camera movement, it doesn’t do squat for your subject’s movement. Want to freeze those bird wings? You’re going to need fast shutter speeds.

Big telephoto lenses can be heavy, making handholding harder, meaning more shutter speed to take out your movement. If it’s too heavy and you have it on a tripod, you’re supposed to turn off IS/VR anyway. You will be targeting shutter speeds like 1/1000th of a second to 1/2000th of a second and at those shutter speeds, you probably won’t need IS/VR anyway.

So now you need short shutter speeds in low-light conditions. Something has to give. Either you need more aperture or higher ISO settings, or both. Professional wildlife lenses, like the 400mm f/2.8 or 600mm f/4 are good low-light performers. Adding a 1.4x TC to a 400mm f/2.8 gives you a 560mm f/4, which is close to 600mm f/4. These f/2.8 and f/4 lenses let you shoot in one to two stops lower light than you can with an f/5.6 or smaller aperture lens.

Many people will suggest taking a 100-400mm lens and adding a 1.4 or 2x TC to it. Since most 100-400mm lenses start at f/5.6 when at 400mm, the two TC combos get you to 560mm f/8 or 800mm f/11. So now you are one to two stops in the hole relative to an f/5.6 aperture. If you start at a base f/5.6 lens and a 1/2000th shutter speed and the camera offers you an ISO of 3200, which is quite common. If you have an f/4 lens, you are now at ISO 1600. The f/2.8 lens gets you to ISO 800. Going the other way, a 1.4x on an f/5.6 lens pushes your ISO to 6400 and the 2x pushes you to ISO 12,800.

Close-up of a downy woodpecker eating at a bird feeder.
To get 1/2000th of a second to try and stop his motion while pecking at the food and wide open at f/5.6 required an ISO of 12,800. Even with post-processing of the image, the image quality suffers.

Why is this important? High ISO noise kills detail. Do you want to see all the details in that bird’s feathers? You’re just not going to get it as ISO 6400 or higher. Depending on your camera, ISO 3200 may be problematic. Now if you are lucky to have bright light, you can get away with these larger f-stop numbers.

Lens options

Now those f/2.8 and f/4 pro-grade super telephoto lenses are $12,000 USD or more new which puts them way out of the reach for most people. As such, you need to look at lenses that are much more affordable.

Canon has a 600mm f/11 for around $700 USD, but you will be shooting at quite high ISOs. Their 100-500mm is a $2900 lens, but it’s f/7.1 at the long end. Nikon only goes up to 400mm f/4.5 is their mirrorless mount, which is the minimum to consider. Sony only has one lens in this range which is their 200-600mm f/4.5-5.6 for around $1900. Nikon and Sony both have 100-400mm lenses in the $2600 range. Nikon does have older F-Mount lenses that can be adapted to their mirrorless cameras which are popular such as the $3600 AF-S 500mm f/5.6 PF lens or their AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6 lens which can be found in the $1100 range during sales.

Many photographers will turn to third-party lens makers. Both Sigma and Tamron make 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 lenses under the $1000 range. Sigma has a 60-600mm. Now I have no experience with this lens, but a 10x zoom lens is hard to engineer and usually, something has to give which is usually build quality or image quality. But for a $2000 lens, the range is certainly in a sweet spot. It is available for Canon EF mount and Nikon F mount, so you will need an adapter to adapt them to the mirrorless cameras.

If you can afford to be faster than f/5.6 do it. If you are considering a native brand name 100-400 or 100-500 with a teleconverter to get the reach, you may find these third-party alternatives a better solution.

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