Nikon 80-400 Day 2: Jurong Bird Park

Weather during my visit was miserable. It was the usual overcast in clouds, which really puts a crimp on high shutter speeds. Thankfully, there were a few breaks in the clouds, allowing me at times to shoot at 5.6/1000 @ ISO 280.

Autofocusing this baby today was a huge surprise. I'm not sure what's up, but I only remembered a few times that it actually lost focus. It's still slow to focus, don't get me wrong, but generally when it's locked on, it stayed locked.

I was able to track a Pelican - granted, a very big furball - through its landing pattern, a nice crescent around its living area. I was really surprised that the AF was able to lock on, and I managed to track/zoom it till it landed, then switched to another pelican taking off. Whew.

That said, I won't use this lens to track faster birds like the owls and eagles. In the morning, the Bird Park has a Birds Of Prey show, and using both the 80-400 and 70-300VR yielded only a few shots where the bird, flying towards the camera, was usable. None from the 80-400 actually :P And a few were from the 70-300 VR were actually in focus with the bird heading nearly head on.

Unfortunately, lighting was a bit low in the morining, so I was managing with shutters of about 250, not enough to stop motion.

There is a gripe with the lens handling though. I've noticed that the zoom ring was very tight to zoom from 80 to 400, but the other way round, it's pretty loose (perhaps it's my copy of the lens). Also, I am unable to zoom from 80-400 in one swift motion, I actually need to crank it 2 or even 3 times. By then, my framing is all over the place and the action is mostly over. Sigh.

That said, I was able to capture a few nice memories. Here's a few:


Malaysian Fish Owl


Egyptian Vulture


... Dang forgot what bird this is :(


Cormorant - I think this is the species of Cormorant that I find very handsome when they're drying after a dive. Pretty cuddly, no?


Shoebill. NOTE: This was shot using the 70-300VR

All images above, if cropped, have their top and bottom removed to change the aspect ratio to 16:9 - I try my best to not crop into the images. Processed from .NEF using Bibble 4.10 om Ubuntu 7. Resized in GIMP. Note, I DID NOT run any unsharp masking on them. You may wish to run some USM on the high res pics to evaluate these lenses - most of them are at their max zoom.