Joe and Mary Ann McDonald's

Wildlife Photography

This is a short tip but a valuable one. If you use a 500mm or a 600mm lens, you might find that finding your subject is a problem. If you're using a digital camera with a built-in 1.5X or 1.6X magnification factor, and if you use a 1.4X or 2X tele-converter too, you may be talking about enormous magnifications. Consider, a 500mm lens mounted on a Canon 10D has a built-in 1.6X magnficiation factor, making the lens an 800mm. If you add a 2X tele-converter to this combination, that's 1600mm or 32X. That's a small telescope! How can you find a subject with such a tiny field of view?

Minolta addresses this problem with their 600mm by including a handle for carrying, that also is grooved so that you can look through the groove much as you would do if you were sighting down the barrel of a gun. Canon and Nikon lenses lack this feature (and I wish, at times, that the big lenses did have a carrying handle!), but if you rotate the lens hood so that the locking button that locks or connects the lens hood to the len is position on top, it's possible to look over your camera's top (at the pentaprism) and look just above where the flash hotshoe mount is placed. That's the center of the camera, right above the film, and if you position yourself so that you're looking almost through the mount (you'll really be skimming the top since you can't look through) and line up the hotshoe area with the knob of the lens hood, 'aiming' that as you would a rifle sight (so that it covers or points pretty much directly at the subject) you'll probably be right on or at the very least quite near where you need to be aiming.

With time, you'll find that aiming a big lens gets easier and easier, but until you get that 'feel,' finding a subject with a super amount of magnification can be a real headache. This should help.