Get a little closer
From wild animals to racing cars, these lenses will bring them into sharp focus
The chances are you’re not in a position to spend a five-figure sum on a lens. Many companies do rent out lenses at reasonable prices, but if you want something for keeps, we are testing some seriously good lenses with relatively affordable price tags.
When you’re going with prime quality over zoom versatility, it’s important to choose the focal length wisely. Of course, it all depends on the size of the subject you’re going to shoot and how close you can get. 400mm often gives the most flexibility. After all, it’s a lot easier to creatively crop images than trying to fit everything into the frame with too long a lens. For certain scenarios, however, like shooting small birds from a distance, you’ll need all the super-telephoto length you can muster, and 500mm or 600mm lens is a better fit. The aperture of a lens can also be important. A 400mm with a relatively fast f/2.8 aperture can win out if you need to freeze the action when shooting sports and wildlife, especially in low lighting. For motor sports, where you want to create a sense of movement by panning and blurring the background, you won’t need very wide apertures. A lens with a longer focal length can win out over a faster aperture.
There’s no escaping the fact that fully pro-grade super-tele primes tend to be real heavyweights. The five pricier lenses in this test group all weigh in at around 3-4kg, so long periods of handheld shooting would be a pain. All of these lenses are supplied with tripod mounting collars, which are equally suitable for use with monopods and gimbals as well as tripods. Even so, at such long focal lengths, effective image stabilization can be a must for getting consistently sharp shots, free of camera-shake. That can be equally true when using a monopod as well as for shorter periods of handheld shooting.
Although Nikon’s full-frame Z system cameras all feature 5-axis, 5-stop IBIS (In Body Image Stabilization) this tends to be less effective than optical stabilization built into lenses, at long focal lengths. As such, all of the Nikon and Sigma lenses on test feature optical Vibration Reduction (known as Optical Stabilizer in the Sigma lens). When using an F-mount lens on a DSLR, optical stabilization is even more essential.