Using a 70-200mm Zoom Lens for Wildlife Photography

Hi, I'm Ian Plant. I'm in the middle of a three-week photo trip. I just spent a week in Hawaii, photographing lava, and now I'm doing two weeks in Malaysian Borneo and Indonesian Sumatra, hiking through the rainforest jungles looking for orangutans. So it's important to have a lightweight and versatile lens with you when you're shooting in such circumstances. Also, I've been working in low light a lot. In Hawaii, sometimes I was photographing the lava at night and I was doing it handheld from a boat that was moving up and down in the ocean. And here in the rainforest, it can often be very, very dark. And when I'm photographing wildlife, I can't use a tripod or a monopod easily. So I'm hand holding in low light. So it's important to have a lens that's very fast, that lets in a lot of light. One of my favorite lenses for shooting in these circumstances is a fast and lightweight 70 to 200 millimeter zoom lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.8. It's one of my favorite types of lenses. It's great. The zoom range allows me a lot of flexibility and versatility. I can zoom in tight on intimate landscape features. It gives me enough zoom range to zoom in on wildlife that's not too far away. Or I can zoom out to show more context, to show the wildlife and the context of its environment or to take in the broader landscape scene. This is the lens I reach for when I'm looking to make a tight portrait of a nearby wildlife subject or I want to make an intimate landscape photo. On this particular trip, I'm using Tamron's new 70 to 200 millimeter f/2.8 zoom lens, which is the second generation of this lens. It features a number of improvements over the first generation. Having a maximum aperture of f/2.8 is great because it lets in a lot of light, which makes this lens a lot easier to handhold and still get great sharp shots. Also when you're shooting wildlife, having that wide open aperture allows you to creatively blur the background. So when you're photographing wildlife subject and your focused on your subject, the background is going to be blurred, you're not going to see a lot of detail there. You're going to focus all the attention on your wildlife subject. One of my favorite techniques with this lens is to photograph a wildlife subject through a screen of leaves. So what I do is I get really close to some colorful leaves and I find a gap in the leaves. And then I frame a shot with my wildlife subject positioned in the middle of the gap. And I focus on my wildlife subject. I get very close to the leaves and I use a wide open aperture f/2.8 and this narrows my depth of field considerably. So the leaves are rendered as an out of focus, abstract blur of color. Whereas my subject is perfectly sharp. Another thing that improves handhold ability with these 70 to 200 millimeter lenses is an image stabilizer. It's a gyroscope in the lens. So that's going to minimize the amount of camera shake you have when you're handholding your lens. So typically if I'm working with a 200 millimeter lens to make sure that I get a sharp image, that hasn't been blurred by handholding, I would shoot at 1/200 of a second or higher, but with image stabilization, I can shoot at shutter speeds that are lower than that and still get a really sharp image. Working here on the lava field is a great place for me to have a 70 to 200 millimeter zoom. I can zoom in tight on some of these breakouts of lava and focus on the patterns that are being created as the lava and moves back and forth without getting too close. If I get in really close to that lava I'm going to boil like a lobster in a pot. One really great thing about the 70 to 200 2.8 lens is that it mates very well with a 1.4x converter. So if you need a little extra reach to zoom in on a distant landscape feature or a wildlife subject that's a little farther away, you can put the 1.4x converter on and still get really sharp shots. So a fast, lightweight, 70 to 200 millimeter, f/2.8 lens is a perfect lens for a variety of shooting circumstances. I think it's great when I'm shooting wildlife, especially if I can get relatively close to the wildlife or if the wildlife is bigger and it's great that I have the option to zoom out the 70 millimeter to show more of the environment around the animal. This is also my go-to lens whenever I've got a handhold in low light. So when it's dark, whether I'm shooting landscape or wildlife, I can use that wide open f/2.8 aperture, let in a lot of light, rely on the vibration control and I can get sharp shots even in low light.