mike cochran

I have the Canon 75-300 F4 IS lens and it works beautifully for a range of subject sizes and distances, great for travel due to light weight and small size, and the IS really allows you to lower the shutter speed, Canon says equivalent of 3 stops, but I think even more if your are careful to brace the cam or put it against tree or other object. One problem is it is not compatable with the Canon tele-converters, or at least that is what Canon tells me after I emailed them with this question. I don't know why that is, and would like to know if anyone has used the 75-300 F4 IS lens with a tele-converter. From pure optical perspective, a prime can better correct for chromatic and spherical aberation, since it has fewer elements, but from practical perspective, it means one lens can serve many purposes and will be on the camera at the time you need it, and you may be less likely to miss the shot while changing lenses.

Hi Marvin

I have a Canon 20D and for birds in flight I usually use the 75-300 IS lens with camera set at ASA 1600 or 800, use shutter priority with shutter set at 1/1600-1/2000, (or on aperture priority just set aperture to wide open and let the camera's auto exposure function set the shutter speed which will be the max for the situation.) For flying birds I tend to use the 5 frame per second drive setting, and shoot RAW + JPEG. I leave the IS with the stabilizer on, and while hand holding (not on tripod), pan as carefully as possible while firing shots. Shoot at max resolution always. A lot of is pure chance, but if you keep shooting you will usually get a few good flight pix for every birding trip. I will post a flight shot I took in Africa, a lilac breasted roller, in the Okavango delta, it is the national bird of Botswana. By the way Marvin, say hello to all the folks up at Temple for me.<div></div>

If you are going in a vehicle, a small inverter can be used to charge the batteries while you travel, including laptop, etc. Also most remote safari camps have generators so you can recharge with AC there. I use an X-drive which is a small battery powered hard drive that holds 60 gig with photo card slots on the side, rechargeable, and size is about 4"x6", weighs much less than laptop, holds more pix than most other non-laptop type devices with drawback that you can't review the pix until you are back in civilization; advantage is it fits in your pocket and you can dump the 1 gig cards in the field while you shoot with another card, download to the X-drive takes about 20-25 min on battery for a 1 Gig compact flash card. Can get these from ebay etc.

We've gone photgraphing Costa Rica two trips, and you can occasionally find a night hike with a guide, around the volcanos in the central highlands; also in the Monteverde Rain Forest and the Osa Peninsula, lots of birds and snakes. We saw a huge boa constrictor about 15 feet long and about 6 -7 inches diameter only about 100 feet from our jungle cabin on the Pacific coast in the Osa rain forest. At night we saw owls, tarantulas like the one pictured here, and other nesting birds, leaf cutter ants, koati's (like an overgrown racoon with a long nose)and loads of Howler and squirel monkeys. At dawn you find the most wildlife though. Use a medium telephoto with image stabilization and high ISO's to get the monkeys and birds at dawn, esp toucans and scarlet mackaws, (don't need image stabilizer for the sloths!) Camping in a tent would be OK just use netting and DEET for the bugs (mosquitos carry dengue but I don't think malaria is widespread in CR); unlike Africa there are no really dangerous megafauna except the jaguar, though you prob want to keep the snakes, scorpions and taratulas out of your tent.

A quick way to see a picture of the bird you want is just to "google" the name of the bird and select the "image" option on google, that way you can see dozens of pix of yellow billed or black billed cuckoos specifically, in seconds.

I went to Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe by small plane recently to 4 remote camps and the weight restriction was 26 lbs, considerably over half of which was my cameras/lenses, so I took only 1 change of clothes, for 2 1/2 weeks on safari. I used nylon type outdoors clothing, similar to swim suit material, made by Wide World Sportsman and Columbia, which are very light and durable, perfect for safari, and can be washed in a sink or tub at camp and will dry in hours or overnight and can be worn wet as well. The pants have zip off legs so you can use them as shorts, swim trunks, or long pants, and have built in nylon mesh 'underwear' like swim trunks, which obviates the need to carry that. The shirt has vents with nylon mesh, very cool, and had long sleeves that roll up and fasten. That way it takes all of minutes to wash your stuff once in a while, and your clothing is reduced to only a few ounces. The stuff also acts as a very effective sunblock. After all that planning it turned out the airport authorities and bush pilots NEVER checked the weight of anyone's bags anyway, so we could have carried more weight. Flights were to Windhoek, Ongava, Kulula, Duma Tau, and Xigera camps. By the way I also carried a small portable 60 gigabyte hard drive made by X-drives, which is battery operated and rechargable, with card slots for digital media, and about the size and weight of an Ipod, so I could shoot full 8 megapixel resolution with both RAW and JPEG simultaneously, and I only needed two 1-gig compact flash cards, which are downloadable in the field ( the portable hard drive fits in your pocket!) and can be recharged back at camp. I took over 2000 pix which equated to a little more than half of the x-drive's 60 gig capacity. It cost about $215 on the internet through ebay. Good luck