Your best camera is ..., part 2

CNE Air Show:  F-18

Sure, the best camera is the camera that's with you--obviously, unless you have options to choose.

For the Canadian CNE airshow, I'd say the bigger lens the better.  I brought to the show my Tokina 80-400mm.  I shot the F-18 to the right at 400mm  (i.e., 600mm on a 35mm sensor body) with my then Nikon D300.  It was doing a slow fly-by with all landing gears extended.  It's too bad it was overcast.  It would have been a superb shot if we had clear sky around 7-8pm when the sun would have started to set, highlighting the one side of the F-18 with an orangeish glow.

The shot of the F-16 to the left was also shot at 400mm.  Again, it was too bad we had an overcast sky.

Just the other day, I was thinking of selling the Tokina 80-400mm lens because I wanted to get the Nikkor 70-200mm lens but after seeing some old photos I took with the Tokina, I think I'd keep it for a little while longer.

Airshows

Just in case someone is wondering what lens to bring to an airshow, I'd recommend you bring something like a Tokina 80-400mm lens. This is an FX lens so it's equivalent to a 120-600mm DX lens. A bigger lens would be nice but having done some shooting at the Toronto airshow this past weekend, I find the 80-400mm range to be perfect for this purpose. There was somebody there that had a prime 500mm lens but that was too restrictive I thought. Sometimes, I wanted to zoom out to 80mm and often I'd like to zoom in at 400mm. There was one moment I wished I could zoom out to 18mm but that was only one time so 80mm was fine for all intended purposes.

Here was a couple of shots from this weekend airshow:

The big lenses

Sometimes, it's great to have that long telephoto lens. They are heavy but they are worth the weight sometimes.

On my hike yesterday, I came across a family of deers. There was no way I could shoot anything decent with my Tamron 17-50mm or my Nikkor 18-200mm. They were way too far away, probably 200m from where I was, in the meadows in a clearing at the bottom of a hill -- I was at the top. I had thought of bringing my Tokina 80-400mm lens along for this hike and lucky me, I got to use it once.

400mm, f/5.6, ISO 800, 1/400 secs:

doe in the centre, 100% cropped:

The photo above was shot with manual focus. The auto-focus had trouble finding the sweet spot, as shown in a 100% crop of an auto-focus shot below -- there were just too many things in front of this buck below:



I had also thought of climbing down the hill to get closer and shoot with the Tamron 17-50mm to get a really sharp photo but as one can see, they were observing me as I was observing them ....