Camera Lense suggestion?
Want to buy a zoom lense / telephoto lense to take wildlife photos while visiting Kenya this September. My camera is Nikon D70s. Please suggest which lense I should go for…
For a camera that age, look at any of the Nikon 70-300 lenses. They are not that fast, so they are generally considered daylight only lenses. But if used in that environment, they would work for you.
But even a 300mm lens might not be enough for staying far away from animals, so you might want to consider a 3rd party lens as Nikon's extreme lenses are going to be expensive. A Sigma 150-500 is about $1, 100.
However, if this is going to be a one-time event, and you will not need a lens such as that in the future, consider renting one. There are several rental places; perhaps your local camera store, and even the online www.keh.com which is a pretty decent operation.
Most of these places offer insurance, which I would recommend if you rent a $6, 000 lens. You don't want to lose or break the lens and have to pay for it.
You'll end up spending as much as what it will cost for the 70-300 if you rent a lens, but if you want to get those really long shots, it is a lot cheaper than buying that kind of lens.
Also make sure you take along a tripod, as anything above 200mm and you are going to start having camera shake issues.
A good tripod for travel is Benro's Travel Angel series. While there are other travel tripods, I like these as they fold up to around 15" or so.
Every time I've been on a safari shoot I took my 70 - 200mm f2.8, every time I didn't need it, you get close to the animals which totally ignore you when your inside the vehicle. If I were to go again I would still take it though.
You don't need a tripod as all the vehicles I've used have ball heads fastened to the vehicle, or you can rest your elbow on the roof, either way there's usually plenty of light for fast shutter speeds and smaller aperture lenses are fine too.
The Sigma 70 - 300 f3.4 - f5.6 gives better image quality for it's (low) price than you might expect. Though not a wild animal pic (I don't know though LOL) this was shot taken with the old non APO version of this lens.
The APO version will have even more contrast.
I think I'd buy a 70-300 VR if I didn't own one already. Additionally I'd seriously consider renting a 200-400 f4.
Don't forget a good allround zoom and a polarizer for that. Also get some and grads, a set of cokin P-series at the least.
Top that off with a decent tripod and an empty bean bag.
Nikon 70-300mm f/4-5.6D ED AF Nikkor SLR Camera Lens was sharpest (Tamron roughly similar to ED), and also lost the least contrast (Tamron somewhere in the middle, ED worst), and the ED and Tamron lenses both appeared to kill color very slightly (not a big deal). Only the ED showed purple fringe w/ high contrast.
But although the 70-300 ED wasn't stellar in these tests, I still prefer it for backpacking due to the low weight and size (and robustness), and I rely on the 80-400 VR for serious wildlife photography where I can tolerate the weight/size in exchange for image stabilization and sharp optics.