Travelling to Namibia with Olympus E410 plus 15-42mm and 45-150mm Olympus digital lenses-is this sufficient?
I'm a keen but amateur photographer whose travelling to Namibia 7 weeks today.I will be taking landscape photos at Namib-Naukluft National Park and -hopefully- lots of animal shots while on safari in Etosha National Park.I like to experiment with close ups and wide angle shots to give perspective.Are my lenses adequate? I don't really want to travel around with one of those huge professional lenses but want to take full advantage of this trip - any help and advice gratefully received
Reply to this Hello Coral and welcome to Travelblog!
I have a Nikon D300 and travel with the following lenses - 12-24 (Tokina), 18-200 (Nikon - but now replaced with the better Nikon 16-85) and 80-400 Tokina.
For landscape and wide shots, I now use my 16-85 over 95%!o(MISSING)f the time. But when I was in safari in Kenya last year, the lens that was on my lens most of the time was the Tokina 80-400 mostly used in the 200-300 range. If you have a high resolution camera you don't need to get that close but can still crop for many times better results than pushing a lens to the end of its range.
Have a look at my blog:
Life and Death on The Great Migration and you can see the photos, but as an idea, here are some details of the photos in the next post.
As you will see below, I think you need something that takes you up to 300mm otherwise you will not be able to get close enough.
Hope this helps!
[Edited: 2011 Sep 02 21:44 - The Travel Camel:11053 ]
Reply to this Eating Lion - 155mm (cropped). If I photographed at 180mm, I would not have needed to crop, but didn't have the time to zoom in to grab this shot.
Lots of wildebeest (and a zebra) - 105mm
Zebra - 270mm
Buffalo - 130mm
Elephant - 220mm
[Edited: 2011 Sep 02 21:40 - The Travel Camel:11053 ]
Reply to this I think the crop factor on the E410 is x2 (versus x1.5 for the D300), so your 45-150 has range out to 300mm, but I would agree with Shane that something around 400mm (i.e. 200mm on the E410) would be better. You could always look into renting a longer lens rather than necessarily buying one outright. However if your photography is simply for holiday snaps (rather than with the intention of blowing things up and selling them) then you can probably get by with what you have and some judicious cropping.
In places like the Masai Mara in Kenya, you can drive off-road, meaning you can get as close to animals as they will put up with, but in all other parks I've visited in eastern/southern Africa you had to stick to defined trails, making having a decent zoom that bit more critical. I've not been to Etosha so unfortunately I don't know about the driving rules there.
Reply to this Thanks very much for the great advice,I have invested in a new 70-300mm lens so fingers crossed for lots of wildlife to take pictures of.
Reply to this Congratulations on your purchase - hope you get some fantastic photos! Hope to see them in some blogs on this site!
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