Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8D AF
I picked up a Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8D AF lens on EBay last week in preparation for our Alaska trip in the late spring (It’s an older one, #3 on Ken Rockwell’s review). This is my first “pro”-type lens: heavy with fine optics, expensive but not insanely so. With the 18-70mm D70 kit lens, I should be covered from the sort-of-wide 18mm to 200mm range (I’m told that the problem with Alaska photography is one of scale: lots of wide panoramic shots and lots of long shots of wildlife in the distance, so at least two lens will be needed to get quality at a reasonable cost). A good, wide lens (say, the Nikon 12-24mm) would cost more than the camera, and I’m not ready to go in that direction yet. I may pick up the cheap Nikon 70-300mm as a walk-around lens before the trip, mainly to get that extra 50% more reach and because it’s only about 35% of the weight.
Anyway, here are some test shots I took today. This is walking near the Flats. Not too many pictures, as the battery died after a couple dozen shots (I haven’t recharged it in months).
I had to get relatively close to the geese to get these shots, so even the 300mm is probably going to be too short; I might need to get a teleconverter for the distant wildlife-type shots. With the teleconvertor on the f/2.8, the lens should still be fairly fast. These shots consist of resized photos (for space reasons) from the Fine JPEG files and 100% crops of a few of the shots to show detail. All shots were handheld, and the flying gulls were there by the luck of the autofocus. The autofocus, incidentally, was faster than I expected it to be.
Update: Actually, the way to have gotten the gulls in flight would have been to set up a trap focus, so that the camera automatically shoots when something gets in focus.