Affordable Wildlife Photography

Most of the time you'll need a long lens to get good wildlife pictures. A top quality telephoto lens is expensive, but a new breed of digital camera, fitted with 10x, 12x, and even 24x "superzoom" lenses, is making wildlife photography much more affordable.

Of course you might occasionally be lucky and find a pride of lions or a leopard close enough to the road to use a standard lens (50mm) or short telephoto (80mm).

Generally though, wild animals are not that obliging. Your subject, say a group of zebra, could be 500m away. Looking through a good pair of binoculars, you can focus on each animal and clearly see the difference in stripe patterns and other fascinating details.

You want a record of this, so you grab your camera and take a couple of shots.

In the African bush, under a blue sky, and with the binocular view still in your mind, you don't even notice that the zebra only fill part of the frame and are not well positioned.

Only later, when your photographs are processed, is it obvious that the group was too far away to make a good picture. It's a record, but not what you saw through the binoculars and what you remember, so you'll likely be disappointed.

If, instead of using a 35mm - 80mm zoom lens, you'd had a tele lens of around 300mm, you could have captured a close-up of the zebra's head with the natural bush providing a pleasing, out-of-focus background.

But a good 300mm lens, with a maximum aperture of F4, is not cheap. A Canon lens of these specs, with image stabilisation, costs around $1,200.

An alternative is a 75mm - 300mm zoom, but here you will usually have a maximum aperture of F5.6. This means shooting at a slower shutter speed and a greater chance of blurred pictures from camera shake.

Bear in mind also that these lenses, combined with your 35mm camera body, are fairly heavy and bulky.

A very satisfactory but underrated alternative to this traditional set-up is a digital camera with a powerful zoom lens.

In addition to my Canon digital SLR equipment, I still use an ageing Olympus C-2100 UZ digital camera. It's only a 2.1 megapixel camera, but has an excellent X10 zoom lens. This equates to a 38 - 380mm lens, plus it is image-stabilised, so allows hand-holding at slower shutter speeds.

Below is a picture of a baboon taken in the Kruger National Park. It's been reduced from 1600 x 1200 pixels to 400 x 300, but otherwise unretouched. The shutter speed was 1/320, aperture F3.2 and the lens was zoomed to 317mm.

Here's a crop of the same picture, shown actual size.

There are a number of digicams available today with 10x and 12x zoom lenses, which at their maximum zoom range will give you about the magnification you'd get with a 400mm lens on a normal 35mm camera.

The advantages of these cameras are:

• Big zoom range, allowing wide-angle scenic pictures, yet powerful enough to zoom in on more distant subjects.
• Wide maximum aperture - usually around F3.5 - that allows shooting in lower light at a shutter speed that minimises camera shake.
• Affordable - you don't need to hock your belongings to buy one, as might be the case if you bought a 400mm F4 lens (Canon's 400mm F4 image-stabilised lens with Diffractive Optics will set you back about $5,000!).

Although Olympus originally provided the widest choice in this category of digital camera, many other manufacturers now offer similar models, proving just how popular these cameras have become.

New models appear so frequently that it's difficult to keep up to date, but below are fairly recent models from leading manufacturers - or you can browse our Wildlife Camera & Photo Store to check for the latest digital cameras at excellent prices.

See also these more recent but related articles:
Wildlife Cameras - the Super-Zoom Option
Wildlife Cameras - the Digital SLR Option.

PanasonicLumix DMC-FZ30K 8MP Black with 12x Image Stabilized Optical Zoom This beauty is fitted with a Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 12x optical zoom that's also image stabilized to control camera shake. 35mm equivalent is 35-420mm. The DMC-FZ30K is not a small camera and looks and feels more like a single lens reflex. But with its image-stabilized Leica lens and 8-megapixel CCD, this is the camera I would choose if I was to get rid of my Canon 350D and lenses - something that I've thought about more than once.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20K 5MP with 12x Image Stabilized Optical Zoom Another in the extensive Lumix stable, this model is also fitted with a superb Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 12x optical zoom lens that combines comfortably small size with superb image rendering. The image-stabilized 12x optical zoom gives the 35mm equivalent of 36mm-432mm, which is a bit limiting on the wide angle side, but fantastic for wildlife.
Canon Powershot S2 IS 5MP with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom This compact camera boasts an impressively long 12x optical zoom with Image Stabilizer (IS) technology that eliminates camera shake - very important when shooting at full zoom. It gets rave reviews.
Kodak EasyShare DX7590 5MP with 10x Optical Zoom Fitted with a professional-quality 10X optical zoom Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lens for amazingly crisp pictures; 35mm equivalent: 38-380mm. Competitively priced, but main shortfall is no image stabilizing facility.
Nikon Coolpix 8800 8MP with 10x Vibration Reduction Optical Zoom Lens The Coolpix 8800 and its newly developed CCD offer 8.0 effective megapixels providing exceptionally high resolution images of 3,264 x 2,448 pixels. The superb 10x Zoom-Nikkor ED Lens gives you the power of a 35-350mm (35mm equivalent) lens, while macro capability lets you get as close as 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) from your subject. This combination is supported by Nikon's VR (Vibration Reduction) technology that helps eliminate camera shake. Great camera but expensive.
Fujifilm Finepix S5200 5.1MP with 10x Optical Zoom Digital photographers interested in taking their first foray into SLR-styled cameras should pay special attention to the FinePix S5200. Equipped with 5.1 megapixels of resolution, a 10x optical zoom, and technology that suppresses camera shake, the FinePix S5200 offers an excellent entry point into the world of feature-rich cameras.
Sony Cybershot DSCH1 5.1MP with 12x "Steady Shot" Zoom Another superb offering from Sony, and up there with others in the super-zoom class, this is not a small camera by any means, but then neither are the number of features. The 36 - 432 mm (35 mm equiv) 12x optical zoom also offers Sony's "steady shot" technology to reduce camera shake, while the huge 2.5-inch 115K LCD monitor makes framing shots and reviewing pictures easy.