OT: any birders / bird watchers on this forum?

[benb]

Originally Posted by echappist

very nice

i've never seen an owl since I started, though I know that they are around, as one hoots quite often

out of curiosity, do you ever feel that you need more reach with a 300 mm lens?

Yah I have (back in my single days when I had more time) spent a lot of time hiking around trying to locate an owl that I could hear but not see, always ending in failure. I think the frequency of the hoots is in the range where our ears have a hard time figuring out the direction of the sound. This owl we saw fly to the branch. Only time I've ever seen one flying.

I don't have the picture handy but we had some kind of tiny owl land in the tree in our back yard in the last couple of years too. Might have been a Saw-Whet Owl. That's it for sightings for me.

As for the 300mm lens... the one I have is a Canon EF300mm F/4L IS. It's an ancient lens in the Canon system. I bought it in 2003, it came out in the 1990s. It was something like $1600 back then. A lot of money. I've had it ever since. It has been serviced once about $350 IIRC, that was in 2017, the IS was not working correctly after all those years.

In terms of shooting birds 300mm is pretty short with a 35mm sensor body... it is a lot more reach with an APS-C body. I haven't had an APS-C body in a long time though cause I mostly just use my camera to shoot people.

300mm prime is long for sports a lot of the time. Not long enough for a lot of wildlife. I have a 1.4X Teleconverter.. that gets me 420mm f/5.6 with a little loss of contrast. I've had to have the Teleconverter serviced too but that wasn't very expensive, it was something in the mount and they charged me very little. (Canon service is absolutely amazing IMO)

I have little desire to buy anything fancier or much of anything new at all.. lenses have gotten absolutely ridiculous.. the next step up to the 300mm f/2.8L costs like $3000 I think, and it's enormous. The 300mm f/4 is already a PITA to carry on a hike. If you go up to a 400mm f/2.8 or a 600mm lens you're getting on towards $10k or something I think, and they're absolutely enormous and you need a really expensive tripod... when I've seen people using them for birding they often have a Gimbal too, which I'm sure costs a fortune. Better to rent but all these lenses cost a lot to rent too. I've never rented a super-telephoto but I have had good luck with rentals in general.

Somehow I'm sure if Canon cancels the 300mm F/4L IS that I have and comes out with a Mk II version the price will be $3000+. Almost everything they update goes up by 2X in price on the lens side the last 10 years it seems. Supposedly the prices are set based on the Yen to Dollar ratio when the product ships, then they never adjust prices which is part of it. But the market seems to be demanding every higher performance and is willing to spend a fortune. It doesn't seem like prices are any better on the Nikon or Sony sides.