Today I'd like to show you a series that, to be honest, came about with quite little effort - actually, for a few weeks I was after certain winged inhabitants of the meadow - lapwings and storks. The plan with the storks didn't really work out well though, but it did give me the opportunity to photograph hares and deer.
I like it very much, when the filigree deer stand in the beautiful meadows and cautiously going through the area.
The main focus was the test of my new Nikon 800 PF 6.3. This is the first blog series that was implemented exclusively with this lens. However, there won't be a detailed report at this point like with the Z9, just some basic impressions. And also the images are not raw, but subject to my normal workflow.
I bought the lens for the 800mm+ often used in wildlife photography, knowing full well that this is not an all-in-one solution in the supertele range. Since I often work on projects where I exclusively used the 840mm of my previous 600/4 FL, I finally wanted a native Z lens in this range. Here are a few impressions:
- First of all, the very stable image and good handling is striking; especially freehand or leaning up: the image stabilizer with 5.5 stops in combination with the extremely light weight for 800mm really seems insanely stable, a difference like night and day compared to the 840mm before.
- The image seems "crisper" in terms of sharpness than my 840mm. However, I think sharpness and resolution from the tripod are about on par, but the 800 PF is more contrasty. For the above reason, I produce sharp images much easier in the situations without a tripod
- The bokeh is nice and I see - if at all - small disadvantages in backlighting with poor cropping especially with blur circles.
- The autofocus feels a bit better, which I noticed with the flying lapwings I had already photographed with the 600 in the same place and similar conditions (still far from perfect, but that's more due to the Z9)
- It's great to be able to extend the 800 if need be, my 600 wasn't really practical with 2x TK, the 800 on the other hand can really be used at 1,120mm, even half of the images below were taken with this focal length
All in all, in my opinion the performance is remarkable and when you add in the price, near amazing. I would have expected the disadvantages of the lightweight PF technique to be greater.
By the way, please consider that all pictures were taken from the car (and one while standing) - especially with the rabbits this means that a perfect isolation oft the object was not possible due to the angle.
For wildlife photographers, the new generation of Supertele is simply a huge step and is really fun. That's exactly what I wish you now when viewing the series, now and then I will also add a 100% crop.
Many greetings,
Thomas
I hope you liked the series! Many greetings 🖐