The Silver Adventurer

I’ve talked in the past about Africa and where to go to see what.  Another issue that can be just as important is the “How?” and that’s what I’d like to chat about today.  I don’t mean “Should I fly?” (of course unless you live on the continent already) or “Should I use an agency or not?” but whether it’s best to do Africa on a group tour, to share a safari vehicle with others, or to have a private vehicle.

Most of the people I’ve talked with who have been on an African safari have either gone as a part of a group, or booked a lodge or two through an agent and shared their safari vehicle with others who happen to be there at the same time.  I’ve done it both ways at this point, and there’s a lot to recommend either of these approaches.

Group tours (we used Natural Habitat Adventures) have the advantage of grouping you with others who will have the same itinerary and guiding you through however many different places and activities you might be experiencing.  We know a lot of people who love this approach because they get to meet people and stay with friends they’ve made through their entire trip.  You can share your interests, talk about your day, and have convivial company throughout.  Yes, we’ve had a few travelers that we’ve not been wild about, but in most cases you can find enough people you get along with to have a good time.

The downside of group tours isn’t the occasional bad apple (maybe one trip in ten will have one) but the nature of a shared itinerary.  In many cases, these tours will target a specific type of facility because they want to make the trip affordable, and because some private reserves in Africa won’t let outsiders guide there.  You also have a mixture of interests in animals, birds, people, etc. and all of these interests mean that you may not get as much of what you really want yourself, in order that all can be satisfied.

The key to making this approach successful is to research every camp you’ll visit and understand how they’ll load the safari vehicles.  Every camp in Africa has its own special magic, its own wildlife, accommodations style, food, and so forth.  You should look up every one (try Eyes on Africa and/or look them up individually) and make sure that you like what you see.  In particular, understand whether the camp is tented or a lodge, because air-conditioned tents are rarely effective and Africa is often very hot.

Loading vehicles is important too; see my next section for information on that.

The next option is to book specific camps and go there as independent travelers.  This option, which is the one we took on our first African trip, seems a bit scary to many and most people probably won’t want to do a multi-camp trip with internal transportation all on their own.  We use Icon Expeditions (a division of Rhino Africa) for our bookings, but Micato Safaris (who did our first two trips) is also excellent, and particularly adept at holding your hand through the various steps in your itinerary.

When you book this way, you’ll share a vehicle on your safari drives.  Most of the vehicles will hold a maximum of 10 people, but any more than six is going to mean it will be difficult to take photos or videos because others will be in the way.  Ask how many people maximum will be allowed.

The benefit of the book-by-camp approach is that you get to pick what you want to see because you can find out what wildlife is common (or available) in each area.  The downside is the sharing process, partly because you may end up more crowded than you like, and partly because of that collision of interests I already mentioned.

Most camps will try to get their guests out to see the key animals (like the Big Five, meaning lion, leopard, cape buffalo, elephant, and rhino) as quickly as possible.  Some people may have seen them already, others may be missing only one (different, of course, from another’s missing one!) and some may be primarily interested in birds or snakes.  Add to this the fact that guest come and go, particularly if you’re staying a long time, and you can end up chasing a single critter that you saw two days ago because a new guest has never seen it.

The private vehicle is the answer, maybe.  If you have the vehicle to yourself you’ll probably always have a chance to take a picture or video, and you can direct the ranger/tracker to the things you want to see when you want to see them.  The obvious downside of this is the cost—it will usually run between $300 and $600 US extra per day, and if you want a special guide for something it might reach $1,000 per day.

Aside from the cost, some people also find private vehicles inhibit their ability to socialize with other travelers and share experiences.  Most camps will serve meals in a common room (though you may be able to eat in your own), but obviously the easiest relationships are among those who have shared a vehicle and thus shared experiences.  If you’re on your own, you may not find it as easy to get to know others in the camp.

So what’s the best approach?  My recommendation is that if you have never been to Africa (and if, in particular, you have familiarity with an outfit like NatHab that goes there), take your first trip with a group.  You can then use your experience to guide you in going off more on your own.  The best overall approach, or at least the most popular, is to use an agent and book specific camps, sharing the vehicle with others more or less at random.  If you have special interests, and if you’re willing to pay to indulge them, private is the way to go.

I’ve experienced all these options and I have good memories from them all.  Over time, on our own trips, we’ve gravitated more to private safaris because we’ve been to Africa many times and don’t have the same drive to see the Big Five.  We’re into birds, in fact, and if you want to photograph African birds in earnest, you’ll either have to have a private vehicle or expect your fellow travelers to toss you out at some point!

Whatever you do, or consider, research your options carefully.  Everything can be great if you know what to expect, and surprises are often unhappy ones.

Memory card choices are always complicated for camera owners, and for those with the new Nikon D500 the choices are even harder.  The D500 has two card slots, one for a standard SDXC and the other for one of the new XQD cards, so you have to decide whether to get one card or two, and for each one you get you have speed options.  The best answer, of course, is to look at cards in light of your own shooting behavior.

I’ve encountered three types of wildlife photography were speed matters.  One is where you’re trying to capture an event that’s happening so fast there is zero chance you could pick a shot or two and hit perfectly.  An example is a breaching whale.  The second is where there’s a critical, fast-moving, activity like a lion kill, and the third where you’re trying to grab a shot at something that’s moving and elusive and you take multiple shots to be sure you have something—birds often present this situation.

In the first situation, you’d like to shoot a high-speed burst long enough to cover the whole event.  In the second case, you probably don’t need high-speed bursting but you’d like two or three shots per second, and in the third you probably need a shot every second or two, but for a relatively long time.

One might think that cards wouldn’t matter a lot in the D500, at least not in most cases.  There’s a widespread view that the D500 has a 200-shot butter, fostered by Nikon’s own material.  Not true; the camera’s “buffer” doesn’t seem much bigger than those of earlier models, but it can write to a card faster—if the card is fast enough to take advantage of the speed.

What I wanted to do to test the cards was to test how they behaved.  The easiest way to do that is to set the camera for high-speed repeat and hit the shutter, stopping when the click rate suddenly changes or ceases.  That lets you see two things—how many shots can be taken at max speed before the buffer fills, and how will the camera/card then sustain shooting.  I also wanted to test the cards (at least the SDXC ones) in both the D750 and the D500 to see what the difference in cameras/buffers would mean.  I used a freshly formatted-in-camera card in all cases, shooting raw compressed.

Let’s start with the SDXC cards.  Anyone with a DSLR should have been using Class 10 cards in the past; they were the fastest of the old scheme.  Now, the speed measure is more often the UHS specification, which has both UHS-I and II and then has speed classes.  See what I meant about “complicated?”  Then there’s the fact that some (but not all) card vendors advertise speed as some-number-x, like “1000x”, and the fact that read and write speed to the cards are not typically the same.

A baseline can be established by taking an old Class 10 card, one from Transcend.  With this card, the D500 did 38 shots in high-speed burst mode, after which it stopped shooting for at least an appreciable interval.  The D750 took only 15 pictures in this scenario and also stopped at that point.  You could do a whale breach with the D500, and probably with the D750 as well, though the actual burst rate on the D750 seemed to be about 5 per second rather than the D500’s ten.

Next, I used the Transcend UHS-I/3 cards, which they rate as Read 95 and write 60.  These are pretty reasonably priced and they gave me the same 38 shots on the D500 at high-speed (10/second) repeat before the buffer filled.  Once that happened I got about three shots every two seconds.  On the D750 I still got 15 shots, but this time the camera was able to take pictures at a rate of about one every 2 seconds after the initial burst.

My second test was with Transcend’s top SDXC card (they don’t make an XQD at this point), which is a UHS-II/3 rated at 285/180.  On the D500, this card let me shoot 72 high-speed images before the buffer filled, but it then seemed to continue to shoot at about 2 shots per second thereafter.  This seems to duplicate other tests of the 1400x Lexar XQD cards.  For the D750 I still got the 15 pictures before the buffer filled, and after that about 1 image per second could be taken.

The final test was with Lexar’s XQD professional 2933x UCS-II/3 card.  This card shot 200 images as Nikon rated and stopped.  But after just a few seconds you could shoot another burst of 200 images, and the card seems to sustain about 4 frames per second forever.  This card doesn’t work in the D750, of course, so I can’t do a comparison test.

So what does this mean?  My own experience is that with some arresting wildlife encounters, you can easily outshoot the capabilities of the older Class 10 cards.  I’ve even done that taking bird pictures.  My first recommendation, then, is to go with nothing worse than the Transcend 95/60 UHS-I cards.  If you presume 2 to 3 shots per second low-speed repeat as your standard, then you could shoot for about 20 seconds before the buffer fills, which is probably enough for most work, and you can sustain about 0.6 frames per second more or less continuously.

The Transcend top-end card, which is 285/180, would give you about 30 seconds of shooting before the buffer fills.  Better yet, you seem to be able to sustain about 2 shots/second for a much longer period—several minutes, perhaps.  I think this is a workable level of shooting performance for nearly all wildlife shooting, and if the D500 held two SDXC cards, I’d go with two of these.  As it is, this card is in my SDXC slot.  It also seems to have a slight advantage in the D750, though I’m not convinced that the difference justifies the higher price.

The D500 doesn’t come in a two-SDXC model, though, and one of the issues with having only one card in the camera is that you can’t overflow if you run out of space.  I’ve done that too—running into something demanding when you’re down to space for a hundred or so images left.  So I think two cards are mandatory, which gets us to XQD.  The Lexar card I tested was truly impressive in the D500, shooting a 200-frame burst and, with perhaps a five-second wait, shooting another.  For action shooting this is a killer combination, far better than any of the earlier Nikon models I’ve tried.

I do want to make an important final point, which is that burst shooting isn’t for everyone.  In fact, it’s not always the best strategy even for those who do need it from time to time.  I think that situations that demand high-speed burst can usually be anticipated so you can set it.  I think that’s harder with low-speed burst, since the alternative (hammering on the shutter to take quick images) isn’t always effective.  The problem with setting low-speed burst is that you often get two shots when you didn’t want to, which wastes a lot of card space.  So be sure you really need burst mode before you worry about card speeds!

Those who have followed this blog know that for almost three years now, I’ve relied on a combination of a DSLR (first a D7000 and then a D750) and a Nikon 1 with the FT-1 adapter to photograph wildlife.  In Africa, this combination has yielded some incredible shots, including the leopard cub I used both as a holiday card image and as a screen saver.  The DSLR was always my “ready camera”, the thing I grabbed for a quick shot before I tried the same picture with the Nikon 1.  This was because autofocus on the Nikon 1/FT-1 combination was more problematic.

When the D750 came along (which I used with the Nikon AF-S 80-400 lens), I found that in many cases, perhaps as many as a third of all shots, I was getting a better image with the D750 than with the Nikon 1 even though the latter, with my Sigma 50-500 lens, was an effective 1350mm.  I spent a lot of time reviewing images in Lightroom, and I concluded that the problem was focus accuracy in nearly all cases.  The Nikon 1 has only a single focus point when the FT-1 is used, continuous focus is a bit problematic, and the focus point is large enough that it often covers more than the subject—particularly for bird photography.

Then there’s ISO.  The Nikon 1 has a 1-inch sensor and limited ISO and noise resistance, and this also contaminated some shots.  If you shoot above ISO 1000, there can be noise issues, and the auto-ISO function only goes to ISO 3200.  With the D750 I’ve gotten good images at ISO 10k, and the camera will go up to ISO 51,600.

All of this made the Nikon 1 a poor choice for birds in places like the Costa Rican rain forest, and that’s ultimately what got me wondering whether I could do better with a new crop-frame (APS) sensor Nikon.  It would have a multiplier of 1.5, not as good as the Nikon 1 but better than the full-frame D750, so pairing with the 50-500 gave me a 75-750mm zoom.  That’s almost twice the effective zoom as the 80-400 gave me on the D750.

When Nikon announced the D500 it seemed almost perfect.  Its resolution is 21MP, not quite as good as the 24MP of the D750 but over twice the resolution of the Nikon 1.  It also promised to have the best autofocus of any enthusiast-grade Nikon, nearly as good noise performance as the D750, and ISO much higher (in theory, over ISO one million!).  So I ordered one, and it came on Monday of this week.  I’ve had only a limited chance to test it out, but what I’ve seen so far seems to validate my assumptions.

The autofocus on the D500 is amazing, and when compared with that of the Nikon 1/FT-1 combination it’s nothing short of phenomenal.  Lock is quick and positive and focus tracking works exceptionally well, where 3D tracking is not available with the Nikon 1 combo.  The image quality, based on back-yard bird photo comparisons, is better than the D750 at the same relative bird-image size, and also better than the Nikon 1 combo.  Shots at ISO levels where I’d have had intolerable noise on the Nikon 1 are clean on the D500.

The downside of the D500 is weight.  The camera is a bit bigger and heavier than the D750, though not as big as the D2X I used for years.  Unless you’re used to holding a big camera, the combo is going to require a monopod or tripod.  I use a monopod routinely for my long-reach camera on Africa trips, but I’d prefer to hand-hold on trails for obvious reasons.

I need to do more testing, and in particular I need to get some experience on hike-and-shoot birding trips, one of which I intend to take later in the spring.  However, for now, I think it’s clear that the improvements in DSLR technology have finally offset the Nikon 1’s crop-factor benefit.

Some qualifiers here, though.  First, I’ve been using a V1 model of the Nikon 1, the first to be released and the one with the lowest resolution and lowest ISO.  Later models have better stats in both areas.  However, DXO Optics tests don’t give them any edge in resolution.  Second, and most important, I’m using the FT-1 adapter to mount long standard Nikon lenses rather than using native Nikon 1 lenses, which defeat most of the advanced autofocus features of the camera (phase detection focus, motion tracking, full continuous focus).  Third, I’m looking for a strategy that works in all conditions, not just in good light in a vehicle in Africa with a monopod.

I still believe that for somebody looking for a light, compact, wildlife camera, the Nikon 1 with the native 70-300 lens would be very hard to beat.  It has a reach of 810mm equivalent, which is more than my D500 with the 50-500 can match (750mm).  If you don’t want to lug a lot of gear on your vacation and want good wildlife reach and RAW shooting potential, the Nikon 1 with the 70-300 paired with something (like another Nikon 1) with a wider-angle lens would be perfect.

I stress the RAW here because I also had a chance to look at pictures taken with the Nikon CoolPix P900, taken by a friend in Costa Rica.  This camera has an equivalent of a 2000mm zoom, but it doesn’t shoot RAW and doesn’t offer the noise performance of either the Nikon 1 or the D500.  However, it’s incredibly handy, and for those who don’t post-process it can produce arresting images of birds and wildlife under most conditions.

I’ve been a fan of the Nikon 1 (in my case, the V1) with the FT-1 adapter and a long telephoto lens as a way of getting extravagant focal length “reach” without spending more than a car would cost.  The combination of the Nikon 1 and either the Nikon 80-400 AF-S or (more recently) the Sigma 50-500 has produced some wonderful shots for me.  There have also been some misses, though.

The basic issues with the combination of a Nikon 1 and a long telephoto, in my experience, are:

• The FT-1 doesn’t support phase-shift autofocus, only contrast. That means that autofocus is less precise, particularly in poor light or low-contrast subjects.
• The focus square (only the center is supported) on the Nikon 1 is very large relative to that of DSLRs, and in some cases the square is too large to get a focus lock on something small or something shot through brush, etc.
• The diopter adjustment on the eyepiece has limited range, and for me it just barely adapts to my vision (and sometimes it doesn’t).
• The ISO and noise performance of the Nikon 1 is far below the standards of good DSLRs like the D750, which is my full-frame option.

On a recent trip to Costa Rica, where I had to shoot under the canopy quite a lot, I was never able to get a clean shot with the Nikon 1 at all.  This set me to wondering whether there might be another option.

All digital cameras that can mount a given lens will throw an image of the same size at any given focal length.  What varies is the size of the sensor relative to the size of the image.  A full-frame sensor won’t crop at all relative to a 35mm camera, an APS frame is smaller and so captures a crop of the image, and the Nikon 1 sensor is smaller yet and crops more.  Cropping effectively increases the focal length, so a full-frame DSLR has a focal multiplier of 1, an APS-frame DSLR (like the D7000 series) has a multiplier of 1.5, and the Nikon 1 has a multiplier of 2.7.  It’s that multiplier that makes the Nikon 1 attractive for long telephoto work.

But here’s the thing.  The Nikon 1 V1 is 10MP, and from the camera tests I’ve seen the later models of the Nikon 1 don’t offer better image quality even with more megapixels.  They also don’t offer much better ISO and noise.  But with sensors improving on the DSLRs to offer more megapixels, might a new Nikon DSLR (an APS frame model) offer as good an image as the Nikon 1 if the APS frame were cropped in software to the same dimension as the Nikon 1 frame.

If we had an APS sensor with enough megapixels, a crop to Nikon 1 frame size could generate the same 10MP as the Nikon 1, in which case the DSLR strategy would be a no-brainer because of the radically better ISO and noise performance and the autofocus precision.  If it offered less, then you’d have to test to see whether the benefits overcame the loss of effective resolution.

I have a D7000, which is an APS frame.  It’s 16MP, and so I did a spreadsheet to calculate the resolution were the image cropped to the Nikon 1 dimension.  You ended up with about 5.1MP, which is just a bit more than half the Nikon 1 resolution.  However, the newer D7200 at 24MP would provide about 7.5MP in the same crop, and the newest Nikon APS-frame camera, the 21MP D500, would provide about 6.5MP.

My first DSLR was the Fuji S2, which was 6MP, so my thought was that if I could get Nikon 1 image size with that resolution or better, I’d probably find the results would justify the DSLR route.  To see whether that was true, I ran image tests using the Sigma 50-500 and both the Nikon 1 and D7000.  When images from both cameras were loaded in Photoshop and cropped to the same subject size, both my wife and I believed that the subjective image quality of the D7000 was better.  Further tests showed that the Nikon 1 won out in bright light with good subject contrast, but as light levels lowered the D7000 won.

Now the question was what DSLR to use instead.  The D7200 works almost exactly like the D7000 and is the same size, but the D500 is the new top of the line.  The resolution of the D7200 is higher, but the early hands-on experience with prototype D500s suggest that its improved sensor, noise level, and autofocus will give it the edge (at twice the price!).  So, after careful thought, I called Allen’s Cameras (Levittown PA) and put myself on the list for a D500.  I can still decline to take the camera if reviews that come out before delivery show something flawed in my thinking, but otherwise I’ll be reporting back here as soon as I’ve had the time to put the D500 through its paces.

I’ve kept up with the models of the Nikon 1 that have come along since I purchased my own V1 and J1s, and also with the reviews.  One thing that I noticed is how few reviews talked about the value proposition of the small Nikon 1 CCD with its 2.7 multiplier.  If you look at the Nikon 1 as just another compact mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) without considering the multiplier, you’re missing what I think is the compelling value of the system.

A given lens, say 300mm, throws the same image size no matter what camera it’s mounted on.  The lenses are typically designed to work on a 35mm camera, whose frame size is 36x24mm.  If you were to mount that lens on a digital camera with a full-frame CCD you’d get the same telephoto effect as with film.  When you put a 300mm lens on a 35mm camera you have the low end of what would be called “long telephoto”.

Put the same lens on a camera with a smaller “APS-sized” CCD roughly two thirds the size, and the image is still the same size, but the CCD is smaller so only the center of the image is captured.  That makes the camera appear to magnify the image.  It doesn’t because the image never changes, but what is changed is how much of the image you capture.  The smaller CCD “crops” the image in the camera just as you might crop it in LightRoom or Photoshop.  The “crop factor” or “focal multiplier” of an APS-sized CCD (which is what’s on most DSLRs and ILCs) is about 1.5, so the 300mm lens behaves like a 450mm lens, which is definitely a long telephoto.

The Nikon 1 has a one-inch CCD, which gives it a 2.7 focal multiplier.  That means that a 300mm lens on a Nikon 1 is equivalent to a whopping 810mm.  Few amateurs, even earnest ones, could buy a lens that big.  That’s a plus in itself, but consider the fact that if such a lens were available it would likely be a couple feet long and weigh seven or eight pounds.  Most couldn’t carry it or hand-hold it, yet a Nikon 1 with a 300mm lens has the same magnifying power.

This shows the two benefits of the Nikon 1.  First, you can buy a very powerful telephoto lens at a modest price because of the crop factor.  Second, any given level of magnification is going to be achieved at about half the lens focal length and size on the Nikon 1 versus a standard APS-framed camera.  You can carry the thing and even hand-hold it.

Suppose you want to do some super-wildlife telephotos.  A single-focal-length (“prime”) lens of about 500mm might be considered a good overall choice, but of course wildlife sometimes is close and sometimes far away.  Sigma and Tamron make nice 150-600mm zoom lenses that when mounted on an APS-framed DSLR give you about 225 to 900mm.  That’s a nice range, but the combination is big and heavy to the point where many people simply can’t carry it and most probably can’t hand-hold it.

A Nikon 1 with a 70-300, as I indicated, gives you about 190-810mm, almost the same range, for about a third the weight.  Put a Sigma 50-500 on a Nikon 1 and you have a 135-1350mm zoom that’s still lighter than a DSLR with the 150-600 lens.

The smaller Nikon 1 CCD doesn’t give you the high ISO and low noise that a larger CCD on another camera would give you.  It gives you a much bigger crop factor, more telephoto magnification, lower cost for a given effective magnification, and less weight.  You have to decide how you value that trade.

I blogged earlier about how to pick a camera for adventure travel, and I now want to take the next logical step, which is to talk about how to use the camera optimally.  I’ve traveled with a lot of “photographers” who turned wonderful adventures into photo-marathons for themselves, their partners, and even their traveling companions.  I don’t want to do that, and you shouldn’t either.  If photography is your only reason for traveling, then frankly you should be reading stuff other than mine.

When you head out on a trip, you should have a strategy for taking the classic types of shots you get while traveling, which are wildlife/action, scenery, and indoors/people.  That’s what one of my previous blogs covered, so I’ll assume that you’ve read that and made your choice, at least in your mind.  The question now is what to do when you’re out there to get the best shots while still being a traveler and not just a photographer tethered to the gear.

The key principle in good photo-travel is perfectible in the field, perfect in post-processing.  In the pre-digital days when you couldn’t see what you shot till you got back and had the pictures processed, most people had to try to get everything right in the camera.  That’s where all the discussions about “bracketing”, “composition”, “exposure compensation” and so forth come from.  I learned all that in the (many) years I shot with film, which for those who don’t know me means up to the late summer of 2002.  It never hurts to learn stuff, and most film techniques are still useful today under some circumstances.  However, digital is a new era and if you shoot digital like you shot film you’ll come away with less than you could have obtained by being a digital shooter.

To do that, your goal is to get an image from a scene that can be converted into the perfect picture with a bit of post-processing.  It’s not to “take the perfect picture”, but to prepare for it.  I’m going to start by explaining what “perfectible” is, and then talk about what to do to fix something that’s out of range.

The first step in being a digital shooter is finding out how to view something called a “histogram”.  A histogram is a graph that shows how lighting is distributed across the shot you took, from pure black on the left side to pure white on the right.  The shot below shows what a histogram looks like, though the details and exactly how you get it depend on the camera.

You may hear that the “perfect” histogram is a bell curve centered around the middle of the graph.  That’s an oversimplification and one I recommend you forget.  Instead of looking at what a perfect one might be, learn to understand what your own will tell you.

First, most histograms will have some “main area” where most of the image falls, a bump or whatever on the graph.  The position of this bump will generally tell you the overall lighting of your image.  If your histogram bump is pushed left you have a dark-ish scene.  If it’s pushed right, you’ll have a light-ish one.

You want to watch for spikes in your histogram either on the extreme left or right.  A spike on the left, against the left end of the graph, means that you’ve got some dark areas that are totally black and will show no detail.  A spike on the right means some areas are pure white and will show no detail.  Your goal is not to have either of these things, because you can’t pull details out of somewhere they’ve been totally lost, and part of post-processing is recovering detail where you want it.

Your camera, particularly if you set “matrix” metering, is going to try to give you the best exposure available, but in adventure travel there are a lot of variables to worry about.  Exposure is made up of three factors—how much light the lens will admit (lens opening, or aperture, or f-stop are all used to describe this), how long the shutter is open (shutter speed), and how sensitive the camera’s CCD is to light (ISO).  If you’re not shooting with a long telephoto lens (over 150mm in 35mm equivalent terms, which factor in your camera’s “crop factor”) then you can probably set everything to AUTO and have a good chance it will all work for you.  Point and shoot.

With longer lenses (which means most of mine, and yours too if you want close-ups of critters) you have to worry about the camera-shake and other issues I outline below.  The camera might pick too slow a shutter speed and generate a lot of motion blur or shake.  For that problem, as I explain below, you have to use “S” or shutter priority and set a minimum shutter speed.

My own approach is to use “M” or manual mode, which lets me set both shutter speed and lens opening, and the camera then picks an ISO setting.  To avoid having to set up each shot by diddling with all the settings, what I do is to “set for conditions”.  I’ll put the camera up, push the shutter button down half-way (or take a shot if the camera doesn’t show you all the settings when you do the half-push thing).  I’ll say, “OK, I like f7.1 most of the time, and for this particular lens and what I think I’m going to shoot, I like 1/500^th second for shutter speed.”  I see what ISO I get with that combination, and I can either adjust something to do better or let it go.  When I take a shot, at first opportunity, I’ll check the histogram to be sure I picked well.

If you have a histogram without the spikes on the left/right ends, you’ve achieved your first goal, which is salvageable exposure.  It’s time to move on to the next, which is focus. Nothing is going to redeem a picture where the subject is out of focus.  All modern digital cameras will focus automatically, but that doesn’t always work.  There are too issues; no focus lock and wrong subject.

“Focus lock” means that the autofocus has locked on a subject.  It takes a bit of time for that to happen, and when it doesn’t happen the whole scene is likely to be out of focus.  If you look at an image by previewing it after shooting, you can usually tell if you have a whole-scene problem in a glance.  Take some time to settle before you shoot to prevent this, or get a camera/lens combination that autofocuses more quickly.

The wrong-subject problem is caused because your camera doesn’t know what you think the subject is.  Every camera will have some mechanism either for you to tell it what you’re shooting or for it to tell you what it thinks you are.  Usually this is done by having a square or series of squares in your field of view.  For some cameras, you put the square(s) on the intended subject and for others squares appear over what the camera is going to focus on.

The biggest wrong-subject problem is what’s often called “front-focus”.  There’s some piddling branch or leaf or blade of grass in the picture between subject and camera, and this creates a lovely high-contrast edge that the autofocus locks on.  It’s hard to see the problem with a quick glance, so zoom in on your subject to see if something in front of it is really where the camera focused.

The final of my three killer problems is motion blur.  You take a picture of a running deer and get a blur.  Obviously you can’t fix that in post-processing, so you have to be sure you don’t do it in the first place.  That means either shooting subjects that aren’t moving fast, or using a fast shutter speed (short exposure, shown by a big number like “800” or “1000”) to stop the action.  To look for motion blur, check the trailing edge of a subject you were shooting (the edge away from the direction of motion) to see if you have a sharp edge there.  If not, you have blur.

OK, if these are the three problems, what are the solutions?  There are none that are perfect, but there are things you can do to reduce your risk or the impact of the problems.

Exposure problems come either because the camera didn’t read the lighting correctly or because the scene has too much contrast between light and dark areas, what photogeeks call “dynamic range”.  The former problem can be addressed by two basic techniques—changing your metering mode or doing exposure compensation.  How this is done will depend on your camera, but the basic ideas are common.

Metering mode tells how the camera picks exposure.  Most cameras today have what’s called “matrix metering” which means that they read light from all over the scene and try to pick an exposure that doesn’t create those spikes at either end of the histogram.  If you have the spikes then metering failed, and you may do better by adjusting.  Spot metering means you meter on the specific thing in the center or under the little “focus” box.  Center-weighted metering means you also consider nearby parts of the scene.  You can try changing metering mode to see if it works for you, but this is a menu item on most cameras so it might take too long.

Exposure compensation means tweaking the exposure from what the camera metered.  If you apply positive compensation you’re going to make the scene lighter overall, moving your entire histogram to the right.  That’s good if you have a spike at the left end.  Negative compensation makes the scene darker overall, or moves your histogram to the left, which is good if you have a spike on the right edge.

The obvious question is what to do if you move the histogram and just create a spike on the other side.  That’s the “too-much-dynamic-range” problem.  You’re going to lose detail somewhere.  You have to decide where to lose it.  Another option is to use some high-dynamic-range option.  Nikon’s cameras have something called “Active D-Lighting” which tries to compress dynamic range to save highlights and shadows.  If your camera supports bracketing you can use that feature to take two or three pictures at different exposures, and you can combine them in your photo editor later on.  Bracketing only works with something that’s not moving or is moving very slowly, obviously, or the position of your subject changes between shots.

Be wary of your ISO when you’re diddling exposure.  Generally, cameras will generate more “noise” at higher ISO settings, so if you have too fast a shutter speed and/or too small a lens opening, the “right” exposure will require a high ISO.  You know when it’s too high when your images take on a kind of grainy look.  Sometimes you have no option but to accept it and run noise reduction software, but if possible try to keep your ISO in a “safe” range.  I can’t offer much guidance on that because it’s different with each camera, but generally under ISO 800 will work for adventure pictures on decent cameras, and generally anything over ISO 3200 is going to need some noise reduction.  Some cameras will provide it, but it’s best to do that in post-processing.

One photo subject that’s particularly frustrating to many travel photographers is scenes that are supposed to be dim.  Interiors, sunrise/sunsets, and even some pictures of something lit against a darker background can look stunning but photograph like junk.  The camera will often “normalize” the light, assuming you want average luminosity for something.  You can use special modes (“Night”) in some cases, or use exposure compensation, but remember that unless your scene generated a histogram with one of those fatal spikes on the left side, you can dim the image in post-processing till it looks the way it should.

If you have a focus problem, the first thing to try to do is refine the way the camera focuses.  Many digital cameras have an “Auto” setting where the camera tries to detect the subject.  That works great for most scenery shots and people shots, but for wildlife the critter is often small with respect to the rest of the picture so you’ll have to abandon the auto approach in favor of picking a focus area (the center is the most accurate).

If even single-center-point focusing is missing, the subject may be small enough that the camera is picking up something else.  The only way to fix that is to try to get the focus point on some part of the actual subject, by focusing on something about the same distance away as the subject (a branch a bird is sitting on, for example) or by manual focusing.  Most people will be unable to manual-focus easily without a camera assist like a subject area magnifier, so try the other approach first.

Motion blur problems are probably the worst of my killer three only because a moving subject that causes one has probably moved away from being photographable by the time you’ve tried to reset your shutter speed or something.  The moral there is to anticipate motion where you can.  If you’re shooting lions and looking for action, don’t go in with a slow shutter speed.

The problem is that most people set their cameras on “auto-everything” and lose the ability to control shutter speed.  Rather than do that where you think an action shot is coming, see if you have a “sport mode” or “action mode” you can set.  If not, then your best choice is to set the camera for shutter priority and set a shutter speed.  Moving subjects will require at least 1/500^th, and fast-moving ones up to 1/1250^th.

A special case of motion blur is camera shake.  Even a stationary object can show motion blur if you move the camera while shooting.  Most people do this with telephoto lenses, but almost any camera/lens will show some motion blur below 1/50^th second.

Boosting shutter speed gets rid of camera shake too.  A rule of thumb is that the minimum shutter speed is equal to the 35mm equivalent focal length of the lens, meaning that if you have a 400mm lens on a camera with a 1.5 focal multiplier, you have a 600mm lens and need a 1/600^th second shutter speed.

Some lenses and cameras have image stabilization (Nikon calls it “vibration reduction” or VR) that will improve camera shake problems.  A good Nikon VR lens will give you, so the material will say, “three stops”.  What the heck does that mean?  Well, if your calculated shutter speed based on effective focal length was 1/600^th, each “stop” means cutting that in half.  That means 1/600^th becomes 1/75^th of a second (most cameras won’t shoot that so it will be either 1/60^th or 1/100^th).

The other option is to stabilize the camera by using a tripod, monopod, beanbag, or just holding it on or against something convenient.  Tripods work well down into multi-second exposures. Monopods will work perhaps to 1/5^th second, and sitting on something will work for shutter speeds down to perhaps 1/10^th of a second.

The last point to consider is the most controversial, composition.  Even in the early days of digital cameras, photo enthusiasts used to pay a lot of attention to composing their scenes.  That was because early cameras had low megapixel resolutions so you couldn’t crop much if you planned to print the image.  If you’re looking to view something online, or if your camera has 18 megapixels or more, the best strategy is to shoot wide and crop for composition.  Get the picture you want inside the picture you take by zooming out just a bit, then crop to your boundaries.

If you’re going to make a video from your images (as I do) and if your camera won’t shoot still images in 16:9 form factor (mine won’t, at least in Raw), then you’ll have to crop each shot.  That means making sure you keep that imaginary 16:9 frame in mind when shooting.  Otherwise you’ll be unable to crop your shot for video without losing part of the subject.

My comment on “Raw” formats here is important too.  Any adjustments you make on a compressed (JPG) image are going to cause issues compared to the same adjustment on the same image in Raw format.  Cropping JPGs heavily is particularly problematic, and as I said in my piece on camera selection, there’s little value in getting a camera with more than about 12 Megapixels if you shoot JPG because you’ll compress away the extra detail.

All of this sounds complicated, but it actually makes things simpler.  With practice, you can learn to grab shots quickly so you get good pictures and still have plenty of time to enjoy the scene around you.

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 1/640^th 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.

Getting a good picture on a vacation is important to nearly everyone who bothers to take a camera along.  It’s especially important for people taking wildlife or scenic trips and who take “good” cameras to record their adventure.  Unfortunately most people have more camera than camera knowledge, and they end up getting less than they hoped for and deserved.

The right camera, and the right lens because the two go together, is a matter of your subject.  There are four things that are usually the subject of traveler photos—people (especially family members or fellow travelers), scenery, “action” shots of events, and wildlife.  Each of them has an “ideal” camera.

One general truth about cameras, something that cuts across subjects, is the whole megapixel thing.  Unless you plan on printing poster-sized images you don’t need more than 10 megapixels, and I’ve printed some darn good 20x24s from 10 megapixel images.  The point is that more isn’t always better.

More important than megapixels is how you store the photos.  Cameras today offer two primary choices—which they’ll usually call “Jpeg” and “Raw”.  Jpeg images use a form of digital compression to let you store more on a memory card.  Raw images store what the camera shot—all the detail.  But Raw images need to be run through photo software to be sent via email or posted online—most such uses require Jpeg.  So most of my readers are going to shoot Jpeg.  If you’re not one of them, skip the next paragraph or so!

If you shoot Jpeg images, the most critical thing is to pick the Jpeg options that give you the largest pictures, the smallest number of pictures per card!  Memory cards are cheap these days, and if you select Jpeg compression that stores a couple thousand images on an 8G card, you’ll lose most of your image quality.  Everything will look soft or out-of-focus, particularly prints.  If you can’t glean how to pick the biggest image sizes for Jpeg, ask your camera store or a friend who knows how to set the camera up.  There are too many variables to explain here.

Another general point here is the whole zoom thing.  You see cameras with “8:1” zoom, or “25:1” zoom, and digital zoom versus optical zoom.  What’s best?

Any zoom means the lens can move between a wider-angle to a more telephoto setting.  The ratio of widest-angle to most telephoto is the “x:y” zoom range.  That doesn’t say much.  Most times you’ll also have a range of focal length, in millimeters, like “10-100” (which happens to be a 10:1 zoom ratio).  That doesn’t say much either.  Cameras vary in their design, and so a 40mm lens, for example, isn’t going to give the same result on them all.

If you want to judge lenses, you have to get everything on a common statistical footing.  Almost any camera or lens will tell you somewhere in the spec what the “35mm equivalent” is.  That’s the number you need to think about, and in the sections below I’ll use this convention.  For your reference for now, a “50mm” lens on a 35mm camera is considered a “normal” lens. Something less than 50mm is “wide-angle” and more is “telephoto.”   Got it?

OK, now we’ve covered basic camera stuff, so let’s move on to the camera-by-subject discussion.

If you want to take people pictures, you’ll typically want a camera that first and foremost is handy.  While some people (like me) routinely carry about ten pounds of gear everywhere, most will leave heavy cameras with long lenses behind when they are being social, and of course social activity is where you’re likely to find people.  Start with a camera that’s small enough that you’re willing to carry it.

People pictures are often taken indoors, which means that you will either have to shoot with flash or have a camera/lens that can handle low light.  Flash pictures look like everyone got caught in a prison break; you lose the ambience of the scene.  I like natural lighting best, so it’s best to look for a camera that advertises that it works in low light levels.  If you can’t find (or trust) that kind of statement, look for what’s called “ISO” range.  The higher the final number in the range, the better the camera works in low light.  ISO 800 is decent, ISO 1600 is better…you get the picture.  Generally your shots will start to look a bit grainy at higher ISOs but that’s better than red-eye.

If you’ve got ISO covered, move to your lens.  Indoors, unless you’re in a mansion, you’re likely to be close to your subject.  That means wide-angle.  In fact, you’d need the wide-angle end of your zoom range to be about 25mm (in those 35mm-equivalent terms I mentioned earlier) to cover most indoor shooting needs.  For outside pictures of people at distances better than in-your-face, it’s nice to have at least 150mm (equivalent) on the telephoto side.

Another thing to look for in people pictures is a camera with face recognition.  Cameras have to automatically focus and set exposure, and those with face recognition will look for human faces and select them as references.

So if you want people shots, something compact with a 25-150 zoom lens (or as we’ll see something that includes that range), face recognition, good low-light performance and at least 10 megapixels will work.

Let’s move on now to our action shots category.  This is perhaps the most complicated category because it exposes you to the widest range of conditions—and issues.  What I call an “action shot” involves one or both of two things.  First, the subject is moving quickly relative to your position, so you have to kind of sweep along to keep up.  Second, the opportunity for the photo comes along suddenly without warning, and if you miss it, the shot is lost forever.

A lot of people who work hard to take decent pictures on vacations will say that the action shot is the justification for what is today called the “superzoom”, which is a lens that has a very large zoom range—10:1 or even 15:1.  For digital cameras with interchangeable lenses, these lenses are described as “18-200mm” up to “18-300mm”, and reviews often call them “walk-around lenses”.  That zoom range would on a full-frame DSLR take you from wide angle to a moderately long telephoto, and on one of the crop- or APS-frame DSLRs (most of Canon or Nikon’s consumer models) from about 30mm to 450mm in 35mm terms.  It’s a nice range.

There are prices to pay for this kind of flexibility, though.  One is dollar cost, obviously.  You can pay a thousand dollars for a superzoom, though there are good ones available for three or four hundred bucks.  Many casual camera users won’t pay that much for their whole camera/lens combination, and if you don’t want to go the interchangeable lens route and spend money, you can get point-and-shoot models with similar range.

The problem with these cost-sensitive approaches is that the quality of the images is likely to suffer.  So, if you go this route, you should look for some specific features.

First, make sure the camera can shoot in raw format.  Raw storage of images captures everything the camera is capable of, and even if you don’t intend to use Raw, a camera that supports it is likely to pay a bit more attention to image quality because the image format can provide it.

Second, look for a large CCD or sensor.  Somewhere buried in the specifications will be the dimensions of the sensor used.  Generally, physically bigger sensors will provide cleaner images.  They also tend to make the camera bit bigger, so there’s a trade-off.  If you want to dig further into the image-quality-sensor-size combination, look for reviews of the camera that test it at high ISO settings.  Good performance there means a good sensor.

Third, look for built-in image stabilization and support for shutter-speed-priority shooting.  If you have a superzoom lens and use it at extreme telephoto you will be very susceptible to camera shake.  Try hand-holding a 30x spotting scope and you’ll see what that means!  Image stabilization on point-and-shoot cameras is a bit of a crap shoot but you may be able to find a review that tests it.  In any event, being able to specify your shutter speed and have the camera set the aperture and ISO (“auto-ISO”) will help keep your long shots steady.

Everyone doesn’t like superzooms, largely because they compromise image quality to a degree.  However, you can take decent vacation pictures with nothing but a superzoom, and you can take good or even great ones with a superzoom and one more camera/lens for wildlife (see below).  For those who don’t want a superzoom, the benchmark strategy for walk-around or action shooting is going to be a zoom lens in the 70-200 or 80-400mm range.  A high-quality lens of this type is going to set you back between $1,200 and $2,600, but it will give you the best possible performance.  The problem is that when you get such a lens for a wildlife adventure like Africa, you’re probably committing yourself to three cameras—one for wide-angle (less than 70-80mm), your mid-range zoom, and a super-telephoto for long shots and birds.

That brings us to scenery.  People stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon or in front of the Matterhorn and ooooh and ahhhhh over the view.  It’s natural to want to take a picture to share it, and you’re almost certainly going to want to give it a try.  The problem is that it probably won’t work, and the “why” of that is important in deciding what you want to do with scenery.

Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and the view extends 180 degrees, literally to everything you can see.  Get a print of that at an 8×10 size (most think this a “large” print) and it will probably cover about 10 degrees of view at a normal distance.  How grand would that canyon be if you could spread your thumb and index fingers and appear to hold the whole thing between them?  The point is that a photograph can never capture the experience, particularly with large scenes.  The best you can do is to suggest it.

What that means is that while wide-angle, even extreme wide-angle lenses are the theoretical answer to scenery shots, the fact is that you may want to think about taking the pictures with a people-lens or a walk-around, because the best approach may not be to zoom out to wider angle, but to zoom in.  A single peak or canyon can convey the scene, and capturing it alone makes it bigger in the eye of the beholder.  A sunset telephoto shot with the sun going behind a single tree may be more attractive than a sunset shot at extreme wide angle where the sun is the size of a pea.

So here’s my recommendation.  Consider scenery to be a mission of your people or action-shot camera setup.  Focus on finding a piece of the grand scene that suggests the grand whole, and work on conveying that piece in your picture.  Don’t buy specialized wide-angle (“fish-eye”) lenses unless you’re a pro.

That leaves us with only one issue—wildlife.  The problem wildlife photography poses is that the wildlife doesn’t pose.  You can’t be sure where one of the critters will pop up, or when.  That means that wildlife photography is a mixture of my action-shot category and some special accommodation for the most common wildlife photographic experience—the so-called “dot-bear”.

If wildlife is really wild, it’s probably going to be far off more often than close by.  If it’s small, like birds, it’s going to be small even if it’s close.  If you’ve seen wildlife shots you’ve loved, there’s a darn good chance they were taken with a very long telephoto lens.  Think 400mm is long, or 500mm?  You’re just getting started.  Table stakes for bird shooting and for some kinds of big-animal shots is probably 600mm.  You’re getting serious at 800mm.

The challenge this kind of glass poses is that it’s “long” in more ways than magnification.  Any lens with a focal length over 500mm in 35mm equivalent terms is probably too big to hold steadily.  You’ll need a brace, the most flexible of which is the one-legged tripod or “monopod”.  You’ll also need something that has very flexible and accurate auto-focus because those dot-critters are too small to cover much of the autofocus sensor area of the camera.  You also want something that lets you turn off autofocus or override it if you can’t get a lock on something.

Most truly long telephoto lenses are what are called “primes” meaning they don’t zoom.  The problem with primes is that they are completely inflexible, which means that unless you’re going to shoot only birds that never get close, or mountain goats up on the high cliffs, you’ll need another camera to deal with other subjects.  There are no truly long-zoom lenses available at a price a real person could afford.

Here, though, let me look ahead to my own kit and offer the solution I found.  The effective focal length of a given lens is determined by the size of its image sensor.  If the sensor is smaller than a 35mm film frame, the camera will appear to magnify more than the same lens would on a 35mm (or full-frame digital) camera.  This sensor-size magnification thing is usually called the “digital multiplier”.  Full-frame digital cameras (the pro Canon and Nikon models) will have a multiplier of 1.0 because they are full-frame.  The so-called “APS” frame cameras have a multiplier of 1.4 to 1.6 (1.5 is the average).  An 80-400mm lens on an APS-frame camera is equivalent to a 120-600mm lens.

Where this multiplier thing can really help is with the so-called “mirrorless” DSLRs.  These are hybrid cameras, designed to offer the flexibility of interchangeable lenses that a DSLR has but with a smaller size.  Nikon’s mirrorless is the Nikon 1, which is just a bit bigger than a point-and-shoot in the body size, and which takes an adapter (the FT-1) that will let you mount a standard Nikon lens.  The Nikon 1 has a small sensor so its digital multiplier is a whopping 2.7.  Put that same 80-400 on it and you end up with a 216-1080mm!  This can offer the best long-shot wildlife option the average person could afford.  However, the only way this works is if the company who provides your lenses makes a mirrorless that will accept them with an adapter.  It works, in Nikon’s case, with Nikon lenses but not so well with third-party Nikon-compatible brands.

OK, let’s get to my final topic, which is what I think is the right answer, including what I take on my own trips.  I want to emphasize here that I’ve been traveling and taking pictures for a very long time and I’ve become accustom to carting a bunch of things around.  I know this is a lot of gear, and it’s up to you if you want to bother.  To make this specific I’m going to assume that the trip is to a destination like Africa that will give you all of the types of subjects I’ve covered.

The minimum kit to get shots you’ll be happy with is a walk-around superzoom and something with more reach to get bird pictures and those of more distant wildlife. It’s a combination of my action and wildlife subject recommendations.

The cheapest way to get to this, from a standing start, would be two Nikon 1s.  One would have the 10-30mm lens and the other the new Nikon 1 70-300.  Closely behind would be the same rig but with the 30-110 lens.  The latter gives you better mid-range distance coverage at the expense of wide angle or people shots.  The 70-300 on the Nikon 1 body would give you an equivalent of 810mm on the telephoto side, long enough to be respectable.  If you want to try a single camera solution, you could test out the Nikon 1 with the 18-300mm Nikon superzoom, which gives you the same 810mm equivalent telephoto and roughly 50mm on the wide-angle side.  I’ve not tested this combination with the Nikon 1 so be sure it works!

If you are a DSLR fan, meaning you don’t want to use Nikon 1s, the best single-camera strategy is probably a superzoom (18-200 to 18-300) on a camera with an APS frame.  This is going to leave you with less than ideal telephoto reach, though.  For that you’d need an 80- or 100-400, again on an APS-frame DSLR.  You might consider a small mirrorless or good-quality point-and-shoot to get you the wide-angle-to-normal end of the range.

If you’re looking at two DSLRs you have better options.  One is to stay with the 80/100-400 on an APS frame for the long telephoto and mid-range game, and move to a full frame with the 24-120mm lens, which covers the range pretty well except for the long telephoto.  Another is to replace the x-400mm with a Sigma or Tamron 120/150-600mm, which gives you 900mm if you use an APS frame camera.  Finally, you could use the Sigma 50-500mm.  I don’t recommend that approach only because the big 500/600mm zooms are too large to shoot without a monopod, and that makes them questionable for your walk-around strategy.

My own solution (probably not to your surprise) is a bit more complicated—three cameras.  My walkaround is a Nikon D750 (full frame) with the 80-400mm VR (not the new AF-S), a Nikon 1 with the Nikon 17-55 for people/scenery (on the Nikon 1 it’s equivalent to a 46-149), and a Nikon 1 with the new 80-400mm (equivalent to 216-1080mm) VR AF-S for wildlife/bird shots.  My Nikon 1s are all the V1 models.  I personally think that you need a viewfinder for photography, certainly for wildlife.  The V2 model is 14 megapixels which would give you more resolution for cropping or printing large images, so that’s what I’d pick if I were starting over.  The new V3 seems to have a hokey viewfinder attachment and doesn’t do as well with raw image processing.

Three cameras invites a lot of fumbles, so here’s the setup.  While moving, the walkaround D750 is slung on a Black Rhino strap and fitting over my shoulder.  You can’t suspend heavy lenses by camera straps or you distort the mount; use something that attaches to the lens tripod mount.  The other two cameras are in Think Tank holsters on a belt.  When I’m in a vehicle on a game drive, I put the Nikon 1 with the 80-400mm on a monopod shortened to rest on the seat, and sit the other two on the seat next to me.  If I’m walking and expect to have to take a long telephoto shot, I’d extend the monopod to the ground and stick the other two in the holsters.

To further complicate things, I can switch between the Nikon 1 that’s mounted with the 17-55 and a D7000 for that same lens.  The APS frame means this lens is a 26-83mm, better wide-angle if that’s what I need.  I also have to point out that the DSLRs are a lot faster in focusing, and they are “always-on”.  That’s why I think a DSLR is a better walkaround choice than the Nikon 1.

So there we have it.  Sorry this is such an essay, but the topic is complicated!

My wife and I have been to Africa a lot, but in September of this year we did our first trip to Kenya to see the iconic wildebeest migration.  This is an event that has to be seen to be believed; it’s as dramatic as what you’d see on television but not exactly the same.  But let me get to that after talking a bit about the trip.

We booked the Kenya portion of our trip with our favorite travel company, Natural Habitat Adventures.  We elected to take two nights in the Karen Blixen cottages near Nairobi, and four nights in Ol Donyo at the end.  Both these were optional extensions offered by Nathab.  From Kenya we went to South Africa on our own (to Isandlwana and Londolozi, one of the Sabi reserves west of Kruger).  I’ll get to them in a later blog.

Kenya is very different from the other places we’ve been in Africa.  It’s like South Africa in that there are cities (Nairobi is the capital and the normal point of entry), but it’s more like Zambia or Zimbabwe in that it’s not a rich or particularly well-developed country.  The people are friendly and the wilds of Kenya are beautiful—rolling savannas dotted with a few trees and (at least during the migration season) filled with grazing animals.  And, of course, predators.

The Nathab trip uses two camps.  In our case, the first was Kicheche, located in what’s called a “conservancy” (a private reserve owned by Maasai and licensed for use, so you can drive off-road), and the second Nathab’s own camp nearer to the river in the national reserve.  Both are tented camps and there’s no city power or water, so you have battery lamps and bucket showers.  Kicheche was a bit nicer, and because the tents were better designed and positioned you had a bit more of a breeze.  In warmer periods, the tents are hot during the day, and they’re often chilly at night.  They give you hot water bottles to sleep with!

Nathab uses a variation on the traditional African vehicle.  Most are open-topped or have a permanent canvas roof, but the ones Nathab use are open at the sides but have a steel roof into which there’s a large cut-out that can be covered.  This arrangement lets people stand in the vehicle to shoot out of the roof cut, something that proved absolutely vital in getting the best shots.  On the standard trips, Nathab also limits the vehicles to five, and we had only four in ours.  We had relatively little trouble keeping out of each other’s way, which is great if you intend to take a lot of pictures.

During the migration period, there’s game scattered all over the Mara, sometimes in ones and twos or tens and twenties, but often hundreds or even thousands in a group.  This is much higher game density than you’d typically find in the southern Africa countries we’ve normally visited.  The predators have a decent stock of prey, and during the migration period at least they’re fit and well-fed.  Lion, leopard, and cheetah can all be seen (and we saw them all).  We even saw a pride kill a zebra, something that’s available on a YouTube video.

The “great migration” of the wildebeest involves well over a million animals, but don’t be misled by the numbers into thinking this is a great single stream of critters rushing for the river.  The wildebeest graze, loiter around, approach the river, draw back, eat and loiter…you get the picture.  Everyone won’t see a crossing of the Mara river, in fact, so it’s important to allow yourself three or four days in the Mara if you want a good shot at viewing it.  The best times are from mid-August through the end of September, but rainfall in particular can impact timing.

What actually provokes a crossing is hard to say.  There’s no “lead wildebeest” showing followers the path.  They’re milling around looking for grazing and apparently smell grass on the far bank.  They approach the water, draw back and think about it (because they don’t like crossing rivers), and most often go back to grazing.  Occasionally, though, there will be enough momentum or some wildebeest will get brave, and they’ll start into the water in ones and twos.  That will generally provoke others to follow, and it begins.

We heard that a large herd of wildebeest were approaching the Mara river, and so we drove on down quickly to get a position, to find a dozen vehicles already there.  Plenty more arrived until the area between the favorite crossing point and another one slightly upstream was crowded with vehicles.  The herd went to their favorite spot, sniffed, pawed the grass, and decided “not today, not here” and moved away and further upstream.  Fortunately for us, they decided to cross at the next point, and we watched as about a thousand animals threw themselves into the water and walked or swam across.

These crossings are chaos.  There are animals bellowing because crocs get the, others that bellow for no good reason other than they don’t want to be doing this,  There’s splashing everywhere and it’s hard to see what’s going on at a broad level because you end up looking here or there and missing what’s in other places.  We ended up seeing three different wildebeest killed by crocs and didn’t even realize we’d seen two of the three until we reviewed the pictures/videos and collected our thoughts.

If you want to photograph or video this event, be prepared to work at it.  The distances can vary between perhaps thirty and a hundred and fifty yards, and often the animals will end up “bending their route” downstream as the crossing progresses, which might take them closer to you (as it did with us) or further away.

For still photographs, you’ll need something like a 400 or 500mm zoom on a full-frame or a 300-400 on an APC frame to get good shots if they happen to cross at a distance.  You’ll want to zoom out for the scope of the thing, so avoid having only fixed-focal-length (“prime”) lenses only.  For videos you probably want to stay with a 35mm equivalent of about 300mm, and even at that you’ll have to be careful about panning too fast or introducing a lot of camera shake.  The people in the vehicle move, you move, and all that introduces jitter.  Remember to hold things steady, zoom at your own risk, and don’t pan quickly especially if you’ve zoomed in.

Once it’s over, it’s over.  They seem to cross in a bunch, and that uses up all the brave ones in the area so you probably won’t see another immediately.  Most people we ran into from other camps on other tours didn’t see the actual crossing, so as I said don’t get all wrapped around expectations (a bad idea on wildlife trips generally).

I’ve posted a quick YouTube video of the crossing that includes both still images (slideshow) and video clips.  You can view it HERE.

I’ve done a lot of adventure travel and also international business travel, and I’ve found it essential to be able to use a mobile phone while I’m away.  Sometimes your own mobile device will work off in the wild, but most often it will either not work or expose you to truly awesome charges.  That’s particularly true if you’re somewhere off the beaten path, country-wise.

I’ve added a page to the SilverAdventurer website to explain how to get at least a workable and affordable international phone capability while traveling.  Click HERE to read it.