Simon and Kavitha

Our homepage – mostly photos.

Photography

What I’m shooting these days…

Since most of my posts here will be about photography, here’s a list of the kit I’m currently using:

  • Nikon D850 SLR
    • My main camera, used with battery grip for max shooting speed of >9fps because shooting wildlife means anticipate the moment, then spray and pray! Happily it’s also got the autofocus and low light performance to deal with even very difficult conditions, like safari.
  • Nikon D810 SLR
    • Second body to save lens switching, and because you definitely don’t want to get caught out on a rare safari if your first body fails.
  • Sigma DG OS 50-500mm APO HSM f/4.5-6.3
    • My go-to lens for wildlife. The 10x zoom combined with the D850’s superb 45MP resolution gives it the range for almost anything, while also going wide enough to deal with animals that see long lenses as an opportunity to frustrate the photographer by getting just that bit too close! Image stabilisation in the lens also means you can hand hold at 500mm at any reasonable shooting speed.
  • Nikkor 24-70mm AF-S G ED f/2.8
    • Recently inherited from my dad, this is probably going to become my main second lens. Nice and fast, gives lovely sharp images and a good focal range for landscapes and close-ups.
  • Nikkor 16-35mm AF-S G ED VR
    • Wide-angle lens, and so far my main second lens. Great for creative landscapes using extreme wide angles and careful use of foreground.
  • Sigma 50mm DG EX HSM f/1.4 prime
    • A wonderfully sharp and fast prime, with beautiful bokeh. Wouldn’t call it a ‘nifty’; this is a pretty large lens with the weight to match the quality.
  • Tamron 90mm SP Di f/2.8 macro 1:1
    • Just dabbling my toes in macro photography so far (bugs here we come…) but this also doubles as a fantastically sharp portrait lens.

…and then there’s the other one.

This is my Fuji X100s.

It’s emphatically not designed as a wildlife camera. It also doesn’t fit my Nikon lenses, in fact its lens is non-removable, and non-zoom, at a fixed 23mm (roughly equivalent to 35mm on a full-frame camera like the D850). It’s a street photographer’s camera that I bought on impulse for the gorgeous retro feel and styling, right down to the clicky knobs and dials and the genuine rangefinder sight. There’s a digital display at the back. I don’t use that much.

It’s also the camera on which I took possibly my best photograph yet, and certainly the one that’s had the most competition success:

Drought in the Okavango (2016). F/4, 1/900s, ISO200.

This image won its category (‘At Home In Their Habitat’) in the 2016 London Zoo Animal Photography Prize.

Taken from a light aircraft as we flew into the Okavango Delta, it shows an African bull elephant – the largest land animal – as a tiny figure at the centre of a vanishing waterhole. Game trails show the traces of other animals that have previously used the waterhole, but I’ve never been able to find any other animals in the image.

My regular camera was at this point tucked in its bag behind me in the cabin, which just goes to show it’s all about the camera you have with you in the moment.