We shall, sometime soon-ish, be heading off on a mini safari and will be, for the first time in eons, doing some animal photography...
The decision has been about what kit to take out of my fairly excessive collection of stuff as the need is to travel light but with gear that has enough long reach to grab shots of crazy critters like the one above but at safe and comfortable distances for both the animals and us humans.
At the same it has to be able to provide for habitat shots too and cater for some good old landscape and environmental pictures as well. It will come as no surprise that I headed straight to my MFT stash of equipment which is ideal for wildlife work and selected two OM-5 bodies and four little medium speed zooms to go with them:
a Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f4 Asph. an M.Zuiko 12-45mm f4 Pro, an M.Zuiko 40-150mm f4 Pro and a Lumix G Vario 100-300mm f4-5.6 II Power OIS.
This makes for a trim, light weight, portable, weather resistant outfit that gives a flexible focal length range from 14mm to 600mm (35mm crop equivalent) in four compact zooms.
Now all we need to do is to get some practice in with the long tele-zoom especially at the 300mm (600mm equivalent) end which despite both the advantages of Power OIS and double the depth of field at any given aperture over full frame (due to the 2x crop factor) still needs good technique to get sharp images when used hand held and wide open.