Zoom vs prime - what is the best choice for wildlife photography?

Above:  Common loon pair.  Below:  Red necked grebe pair.  Photographed in Alberta.

I have to say, both zooms and primes have their place in your kit.  They both have pros and cons and, as such, have a reason why you would chose one over another.  As nice as it would be to have both and pick the lens that fits the current need, the fact is that many people can only have one or the other, especially when it comes to long focal length lenses.

Right away, though, I want to discount all-in-one lenses that give you a range from 28 - 300 mm, or in the case of some ultra zoom compacts, boast a zoom range of 24-3000 mm.  Although their range is legendary, the quality of the resulting images is generally poor, especially if you want to enlarge or crop significantly.  Professionals don't use them for a very good reason.

The cameras I use my long lenses on are APS-C bodies with a 1.5x crop factor.  This increases the relative focal length to 750 mm for the 500 and 900 mm for the 150-600 at 600 mm.  Using a 1.4x teleconverter (TC) pushes the 500 up to over 1000 mm relative with a minimum aperture of f/8.  I find the 20 or 24 mp sensors very acceptable.

I created a table (below) on the pros and cons of primes & zooms in Word and imported the data as a jpeg.  I hope you find it useful.

Pros and cons of zooms and primes (as a general rule).

Right now I have 2 lenses that fall into the above categories.  I have an 80-400 mm zoom and a 500 mm prime.  That situation will likely evolve.  It is important that your long lenses have some form of image stabilization, either through the lens, the body, or both.  When shooting at f/5.6 in low light, a fast shutter speed to compensate for camera motion will require very high ISOs.  Both lenses have VR (Nikon) and I can say unequivocally that it has made an enormous difference to my photos.  Although I like my wildlife photos to be at higher shutter speeds, I also covet low ISO values.  As a guideline, I like to shoot at ISO 200, but will go much higher depending on the situation.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com