Nourify Photography

San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, Irvine

Wildlife photography is perhaps one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, experiences in photography. It is way beyond going to the zoo, and taking pictures of the animals in captivity! Wildlife photographers take pictures of wildlife in their natural habitats. As such, they not only need to have excellent technical skills and highly specialized equipment (e.g., fast long lenses such as Nikon 800mm f/5.6), they should also love nature, and should know a lot about their wildlife subjects. Master wildlife photographers are intensely passionate about wildlife and in order to capture their perfect shots, they may spend hours, if not days and months, following every subject. In case you are interested, some of the more well-known wildlife photographers and links to their portfolios are listed here.

We would never dare consider ourselves wildlife photographers by any stretch of imagination. We simply do not posses all the knowledge, the skills, the equipment, and the dedication which are all critical ingredients for being successful in wildlife photography. That said, we do still very much enjoy taking pictures of wildlife in any opportunity we get. Living in Orange County, CA, one such opportunity, particularly for taking bird pictures, would arise while visiting San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary in Irvine.  It is a fairly large sanctuary nestled in the middle of the city with a few ponds and hiking trails, and is particularly popular with the bird watchers. Amazingly, more than 282 bird species have been documented through visitor and staff observations. You can find the information about all the birds in San Joaquin and their associated seasonal abundance in this checklist.

Back to photography. We recently acquired a Nikon 300mm f/4 AF-S lens together with a Nikon TC-20E III teleconverter, and decided to visit San Joaquin and put them both to test. While 300mm f/4 is not a particularly long or a very fast lens, it has received many excellent reviews such as this one. As for the teleconverter, Nikon 1.4x TC-14E II is typically recommended, and is shown to cause minimal loss in image quality. The 2.0x TC-20E III, on the other hand, provides a bit longer reach at the expense of further loss in light (which impacts auto-focus performance and requires further stopping down), and further degradation in image sharpness. A good comparison of the Nikon teleconverters can be found here.

Here are some of the pictures from our most recent visit. Hope you like them. As always, please feel free to leave comments and critique.Thanks for visiting…

 

 

 

 

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