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Moose Peterson: Using the Right Lenses for the JobAdvanced Content

by B. Moose Peterson

© B. Moose Peterson Loading...

© B. Moose Peterson

Great Blue Heron

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B. Moose Peterson is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens

You can hike into the great outdoors with a fully-loaded backpack, ready for any and all possibilities, and I won't tell you that's not the way to go. But you can also pare down the gear to a body or two and two lenses and still get the job done.

I've recently been photographing with two lenses that totally complement each other and make for the perfect duo for a wildlife photographer: the AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED and the AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR.

To understand how these two work together, we first need to get past the stereotypes. Telephoto lenses do make it easier to make distant subjects appear bigger in the viewfinder and in the final image, but that’s not making the most of the gifts these lenses offer. We want to take advantage of the angle of view and the perspective they bring to our photography. The 70-300mm has an angle of view of 8 to 34 degrees; the 600mm, 4 degrees, and it's because of these factors that the 70-300mm is the perfect lens for big game and the 600mm is the perfect lens for birds.

Our challenge in wildlife photography is to convey in our image all that we sense at the point of capture. For instance, magnificent Rocky Mountain elk and bighorn sheep are iconic symbols of the wilderness, and to be effective and dramatic, our images need to reflect that fact. A lens like the 70-300mm will compress the image—in effect, making the background appear closer to the subject. That's exactly what you want to express: these subjects are powerful parts of the landscape.