Really the only thing I didn’t like about the is the 800 was the lens hood. My mind told me it should be a futile experience, but the reality is I shot the 800 handheld 95% of the time and the stabilization was rock-solid. I was equally impressed with the stabilization of the rig, especially shooting an 800mm lens handheld at slow shutter speeds. While not a cheap lens by any stretch, I’m glad Nikon struck the balance here of mid-tier price and exceptionally high quality, versus a “budget” option (e.g., Canon 800 F/11) which would make something like a 200-600 zoom more appealing to me, personally. The 800, like the 300 PF and 500 PF lenses before it, offers something truly unique and special - a handheld optic that gives up little to conventional telephoto prime lenses but in a much smaller and lighter package. It’s simply a fantastic optic that is exceptionally versatile, reasonably lightweight, and produces better quality images than I would have expected. I walked away with essentially no significant complaints about the 100-400 lens. There were times that I expected the background bokeh to be busy and offensive, and that simply wasn’t the case the majority of the time. ![]() Needless to say, I was extremely very pleased with the out of focus rendering of both lenses, despite not being a bright aperture F/2.8 or F/4.0 prime. This was especially evident to me in 5th and 6th photos below. It reminds me of looking through a set of high quality binoculars that have a very flat field, which in turn provide and sort of a layered 3-dimensional effect. What I found most impressive was the way the lenses rendered foliage and out of focus backgrounds, seeming much more “prime-like” than I would expect from a variable-aperture zoom. Although it can be highly subjective and difficult to spot differences between equivalent types of lenses across systems, these Nikon Z lenses seem to have a unique optical quality that goes beyond pure critical sharpness. With the 100-400, I found the resulting images much more pleasing than I ever expected out of a variable aperture zoom. Having the ability to zoom with the dogs was important, and thus the 100-400 was probably the most useful optic for these moments. Some of these things are tough to stomach, and you never now how you are going to react until it happens in front of you. Nature can be cruel, but also fascinating at the same time. Once the animal succumbs, it is destroyed by the dogs almost instantly in a feeding frenzy, and then the dogs return to the den to regurgitate the spoils for the alpha female and/or pups. The dogs hunting style is covering a large area scattering the herd, honing in on an individual, exhausting it, and then picking apart the animal bit by bit - even while it’s still moving. The tight-knit functioning of the pack It makes them seem more like an individual unit versus a group of self-guided animals. The dogs have an uncanny ability to communicate with and respond to one another which includes both visual and audible cues. ![]() All of these cameras can focus as close as 0.4 inch from the front of the lens.The dogs have fascinating pack mentality which includes an alpha female who tends to the den and pups, and the rest of the pack who hunts then returns to the den in a support role. That means macro capabilities are important. Macro and close-up modes: Because light doesn’t travel very well through water, a lot of underwater photography happens very close to the subject of the photo.And pretty much all modern tough cameras work at subfreezing temperatures down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Similarly, you’ll need at least 5 feet-chest height for many people-of drop resistance. ![]() We considered a depth rating of 40-plus feet to be the minimum (50-plus was preferable). Snorkeling is unlikely to take you below 10 feet, but your camera’s depth limit should give you room to spare in case you drop the camera accidentally underwater. Waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof: Since ruggedness is the very reason these cameras exist, we took into account the manufacturer’s stated limits.For any camera nerds who are wondering, we set a cutoff of f/3.5 or larger as the maximum aperture. Large-aperture lens: Since light falls off dramatically the farther you dive below the surface of the water (they don’t call them the murky depths for nothing), it helps to have a lens that lets in as much light as possible.
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