An Adventure with EF 400mm f5.6 L lens

Wildlife Photography, a field of photography that can be exciting and fun, photographing many different types of wildlife in your local areas and surroundings or traveling overseas to experience different climates, terrains and types of unique wildlife that can be  photographed. This photography field usually requires more dedicated and niche equipment especially the longer prime lenses because the objects (wildlife) are usually quite far away and only 400mm lenses and above would be able to capture them nicely and they are not too small in size on your photo!

Recently I was kindly loaned Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L by my photographer friend David, you can check out his photos here on 500px and he’s into bird photography. It was a very nice gesture from a fellow photographer and it’s also a very nice “poisoning” (inducing/encouraging to buy more lenses!) to make me accelerate my plans to buy a telephoto lens (I am aiming at a 2nd hand Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L lens)

I took the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 on a walkabout over 2 weekends for a wildlife photography walkabout around the greenery nearby my home. Although my main aim was Bird Photography, the 400mm f/5.6 suits other animal/wildlife photography too! The lens isn’t too heavy for a walkabout wildlife lens, however, you need to get used to the extra weight on your neck and shoulders! The Auto Focus is pretty fast and accurate, being able to track, follow, focus and photograph the animal (birds flying in the context of my post here) pretty quickly. It would not really be fair, comparing it with her cousin EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS USM (that I got the chance to try it out during Formula Drift 2012) though. The EF 400mm f/5.6 is a very decent and fast prime lens, highly suitable for walkabout wildlife photography whereby you don’t really need a significantly faster Auto Focus and the need for a bigger aperture.

Using the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 lens was a great fun and experience for me to venture into Bird Photography, something that I haven’t started to explore without the super telephoto prime lenses. Hopefully, when I finally get to own the EF 300mm f/2.8 L lens, I can go for my wildlife photography more often, probably equip myself with the extenders 1.4x and 2.ox to complement my EF 300mm f/2.8 L lens (hopefully in the near future!)

Take a look at my wildlife photography photographs here on Flickr !


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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