I have been without a serious birding lens for quite a while now. Last year, I had a Sony 200-600mm lens. It was pretty good, but was difficult to use unless the sun was out. It needed a bright subject to work well, both in terms of ease of use and image quality. Since I didn’t use it often, I sold it to buy the Canon 200mm f/2, which I use a lot. It’s just not enough of a telephoto lens for birding.
The sweet spot for bird photography is a telephoto that is at least 400mm in focal length, up to about 800mm or so. But a good bird lens also has to have a large aperture (also called a ‘fast’ lens). That was the weak spot of the 200-600—it wasn’t a fast lens. As a result, I had to boost ISO, which makes images fuzzier.
The reason for such long telephoto lenses is that you can be at a distance from the birds, which means a) they show up in the first place, because you’re not too close; b) you get decent magnification.
The primary obstacle to such lenses is cost. A fully modern fast telephoto costs from $5k to $15k—no joke. Way out of my price range.
Such lenses have many cool features, starting with being really super sharp. But they also have built-in image stabilization, automatic focus, and they are usually as fast as possible, letting in a lot of light so I can use a low ISO and a fast shutter speed to freeze the bird in action. (You don’t realize how much birds move, and how fast, until you try to take photos with a slow lens.)
Historically, there have been good birding lenses for more than 50 years. Long telephotos have been with a long time. The problem is that they don’t have features like light weight, autofocus, and other modern lens features.
But they have the one thing one really must have for birding: excellent sharpness. Because those cool features are missing, as the photographer you have to train yourself to focus quickly and well in order shoot bird photos with these old lenses. I grew up on manual photography, so while I did have to practice to get my skills back—I got my skills back.
I spotted a very old—vintage, I will call it—lens, a Canon FD 500mm f/4.5. “FD” is the Canon lens series that came out in 1971, and the 500mm lens was introduced in 1979, in time for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It was a very big deal at the time, state of the art. The one I spotted was in pretty rough shape—dents, peeling paint, lots of wear and tear. But the price was affordable. And I have experience with optics; unless something was truly damaged, I would be able to clean it, grease the gears, and bring it back to health of necessary.
But it arrived really cleaned up (thank you, Roberts Camera!), so I put it right to work this afternoon, and boy is this thing SHARP! Wow. So I think that although it’s a bit of a beater cosmetically, it is a very sound and very accurate lens.
It even works well for video.
Historical note: these big lenses were a huge deal back in the day; they generally were coveted by sports photographers as well as wildlife photographers. They tended to come out just prior to the Olympic Games, as the 500mm FD lens did, and photographers would compete to get hold of a copy as soon as they could. I remember those days; I remember them being crazy expensive—I only had to wait 50 years to get mine!