I’ve blogged earlier about my decision to use the Nikon 1 (V1) along with a telephoto lens (initially the Nikon 80-400 AF-S) for bird and wildlife photos. The 2.7:1 multiplier for the Nikon 1 makes it ideal for birds because you can get effective focal lengths way beyond anything practical with a full-frame or even APS-frame DSLR. The 400 mm lens, for example, is equivalent to 1080mm on the Nikon 1.
One reason this magnification is so important is that birds are small, but a related issue is that they’re often in trees which means they’re not in good light. With lower light levels ISO has to rise, and that means more digital noise. At any given ISO, the apparent noise in a bird picture is related to the amount of cropping you do to get a satisfactory image size. Thus, a big telephoto that doesn’t need much cropping exposes you to lower noise levels.
The obvious question introduced by this line of reasoning is “How telephoto can you go?” Nikon’s 80-400 and their 200-400 are their longest zoom lenses. I’ve tried a 500mm prime, but I found that fixed focal length with wildlife is a major impediment, and the lens is a monster in any event. The logical option is to go to another manufacturer.
I’ve used Sigma lenses for years, and like most who use third-party lenses on Nikon bodies for a long period, I’ve experienced some glitches. My Sigma 500 had to be re-chipped to use even with the D7000, but I admit it was an older model. When Nikon upgraded the Nikon 1’s FT1 adapter that lets you use DSLR lenses with the little camera, the upgrade killed all the Sigmas I had and I ended up buying another FT1 I could freeze in the old firmware version just to use them. However, the FT1 upgrade gave you AF-C mode autofocus so that was a big loss.
On my September 2014 trip to Kenya and South Africa, I had the “new” AF-S version of the 80-400mm on the Nikon 1 and my older non-internal-focus 80-400 on my D7000. The combination worked out pretty well, but there was a lot of overlap in the lens range. The 80-400 on the D7000 was equivalent to a 35mm 120-600mm and the Nikon 1 was equivalent to 216 to 1080mm. I also wanted better autofocus, particularly in dim light, on my “ready” camera, the D7000.
The first part of my solution was to buy the D750 to make it my ready camera. With the 80-400mm it was a “real” 80-400 which narrowed the overlap, and it focuses a lot better with that lens even though the older 80-400 lacks the high-speed internal motor. This combination worked pretty well on a trip to Baja in November 2014 but winds limited the birding opportunity and so I couldn’t give it a full test.
The other part of the solution would obviously be to extend the top end of the Nikon 1 range. Sigma and Tamron had both just come out with 150-600 lenses, which would on the Nikon 1 be 405-1620mm, an inspiring range. The problem is the size of the lenses. I’m not adverse to big lenses but neither would fit in my Think Tank holster, so I’d have needed to carry in a backpack, which makes the combination far less accessible.
The next choice was the Sigma 150-500, which is reasonably priced and smaller, but it turns out that it’s not quite small enough. It’s also generally considered inferior to another Sigma model with a 500mm max zoom, the venerable “Bigma” 50-500 now upgraded with optical stabilization. Not only does the 50-500 get a better review, it’s also shorter so it fits (tightly I admit) into the holster. So I ordered it, after advance research and an email exchange with Sigma assured it would work with the Nikon 1.
It does. The lens came in and I ran a quick test, and sure enough it autofocuses correctly with the new FT1 firmware in AF-C mode. Image stabilization also works, and the quality of the image seems comparable to that of the Nikon 80-400 AF-S. However, because the top zoom range is now 1350mm, I have 20% more focal length to magnify images, which means I don’t have to crop as tightly and don’t show as much noise. The true test for this was my trip to see the Monarch butterfly migration in Mexico.
The first of our visits to a sanctuary took us by truck and horseback up to over 10,000 feet, and when we arrived we were literally in the middle of a butterfly migration—just a short one that the guide called “moving day”. The butterflies move around within a suitable area, looking for snacks and water. We happened to get there on such a day, which meant that the whole congregation was up and about rather than hanging passively in clusters in trees.
There were carpets of butterflies on the ground and they covered trees and bushes, so I trotted out the monopod and the Nikon 1/Sigma combination to have a go. My initial results were frustrating and disappointing, and I didn’t understand that because I’d tried everything at home. Fortunately for me my wife Linda had forgotten her monopod, which she needed to shoot stable video, so I unscrewed mine and gave it to her. Handheld the lens/camera performed superbly. I had the lens in VR Mode 1, and that worked with the Nikon lenses on a monopod. It didn’t work with the big Sigma. I later found out that the best approach was actually to hand-hold in Mode 1. Mode 2 worked OK on a monopod, but the best monopod strategy seems to be to crank up the shutter speed to 1/640th or higher and turn VR off.
I’ve had a chance to process the shots now, and also to compare them with the shots from the Nikon D750 with the Nikon 80-400 AFS. If I got the image the same size in the viewfinder the D750 outperformed the Nikon/Sigma combination, to no surprise given that the camera cost four times as much and has 24 megapixels instead of 10, and the Nikon lens was a grand more. The reality is that you rarely have an opportunity to fill a frame with a butterfly. I could shoot what looked like full-frame close-ups on butterflies twenty feet away with the Sigma lens. They were sharp and clean.
Later in the trip I had a wonderful day doing birding and bird photography with a local guide (Rafael). I followed my normal walk-around mode of shooting, which meant both the Nikon 1/Sigma combination and a D7000 with a 17-55 in Thinktank holsters, and the D750/80-400 combination on a strap as my ready camera. If we saw something I’d grab some shots with the D750 and then if it stayed around long enough, pull out the Nikon 1 and Sigma and get a (much) closer shot. I got some of the best bird pictures of my career here, on birds so far away that they’d were almost unidentifiable in the D750 frame at full zoom.
I love the Nikon 1/Sigma 50-500 combination, but I want to emphasize that this is still IMHO a very specialized piece of gear. It’s not for snap shots of things that suddenly appear because the Nikon 1 has a multi-second delay to turn on. It’s not going to offer the instant autofocus of a D750 nor does it track birds in flight. What it’s good for is super-telephoto shots of small or far-away (or both) things, and for that I think this combination is hard to beat.