Foto at top: Holland sun Red Kite (Rode Wouw) size 63cm distance 65m equivalent 1050mm D500 Nikkor 500mm f/5.6E PF VR standard camouflage APERTURE mode Birds 1/6000 f/8 ISO 560 -1.5EV. Crop 2700 x 1800.

Our ideas about “lightweight” bird photography;

Over the years we gradually developed our “ideal method” of bird photography based on these five rules and facts:

1. Know your birds and their behaviour, use camouflage and never disturb them

Speaks for itself. Grant yourself time. Gather sufficient knowledge of local birds and use adequate camouflage in order to get birds within reach of your equipment without disturbing or chasing them.

2. Know and use some interesting features of Nikon equipment

• Don’t use lenses like Nikkor 500mm/600mm f/4.0E VR unless you can really handle them. They are generally too heavy for lightweight bird photography .
• Semi pro D500 uses AF module of full pro D6. So for bird action photography use this D500.
• Nikon Z camera’s and Z lenses produce more detail & image quality than classical F mount DSLR‘s and lenses.
• Nikon phase fresnel lenses Nikkor 300mm PF, 500mm PF and Z 400mm PF are ultralight and top quality.
• Aspherical Nikkor TC-20E III doubles 35mm equivalent F-mount lenses without significant quality loss!
• Nikkor TC-14E III provides 700mm equivalent using Nikkor 500mm f/5.6E PF VR without image quality loss.
• Underexposing like -1.50 EV protects detail highlights. Count quickly 0.50EV steps.
• If required use modern denoising tools in post processing.

3. Use our special “APERTURE mode Birds”:

Use all available light you can get and keep APERTURE values fixed. In bird photography one almost always uses telelenses wit low APERTURE values. Don’t make it worse “stopping down” modern lightweight Nikon Z telelenses does not make much sense any more.

Setting a9 at D500 this way you can extremely fast switch between the two options left: Single point AF (fast and accurate) and GROUP (our preference when tracking active or moving birds).

a9 = limit AF options: restrict D500 to 2 options out of 7 like: Single point and GRP out of Single point, dynamic 25 points, dynamic 72 points, dynamic 153 points, 3-D, GROUP or auto AF.

This results in using maximally three essentially different combinations of Nikon equipment. We use D500, Z50, Nikkor 300mm f/5.6E PF VR and Nikkor 500mm f/4E PF VR.

Z50: You only use three camera buttons during actual bird photography like this:

D500: You only use three camera buttons during actual bird photography like this:

D500: you only use three camera buttons during actual bird photography like this:

Some example pictures using these three combinations:

Birds (relatively) far away (reach):

Active birds (action photography)

Handheld tracking moving birds (using ultralight equipment)

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