Buying a super telephoto lens on a budget

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Autofocus lenses

Nikon lenses

Nikon updated a lot of their lenses to faster autofocus motors, so the older AF-I lenses are cheaper than their newer AF-S equivalents. Prices for AF-I lenses tend to be a couple thousand dollars lower than new Nikon AF-S super telephotos, but they can sometimes be as much as 50% lower than the price of new models if you find a cosmetically ugly lens.

Canon lenses

Canon 500mm F/4.5L USM
Approximate street price: $3000
This is an excellent lens by all measures. It went out of production in 1998 and it may now be difficult to find spare parts if the auotofocus motor dies. It’s considerably lighter than the Canon 500mm F/4.0L IS USM, at the sacrifice of image stabilization and autofocus when used with teleconverters (on most camera bodies). It is supposed to be very similar to the Sigma 500mm F/4.5 EX APO HSM.

3rd party lenses – Primes

Sigma 500mm F/4.5 EX APO HSM
Approximate street price: $2000-$3000
I own this lens, which I bought used from Keh for $2000 after searching for several months for one for a good price. I wanted an autofocus prime lens that was at least 500mm, so the Sigma 500mm F/4.5 was the best choice. I have a full review of it here. It has been replaced by the Sigma 500mm F/4.5 EX DG APO HSM, which sells new for $4200. Note that this lens goes for about the same price as a manual focus Nikon 500mm F/4.

3rd party lenses – Zooms

Zoom lenses are less sharp and have slower autofocus than primes. Zooms give you a bit more flexibility and are best suited for larger subjects like mammals, but if you are mostly interested in bird photography you should go for a prime instead of a zoom since you will be shooting at the maximum focal length almost all the time.

Many zooms, particularly 3rd party zooms, are marketed towards amateurs rather than pros or serious amateurs, meaning that they are worse quality – softer and slower – but less expensive than equivalent primes.

Sigma 50-500mm F/4-6.3 EX DG APO HSM
Approximate street price: $1000
At F/6.3 I don’t know if this qualifies as a super telephoto lens. It is targeted at a less serious market than most primes, and is therefore worse quality but less expensive than 500mm primes. Don’t expect to be able to take as “snappy” pictures with blurred out backgrounds as you can with faster lenses.

Sigma 170-500mm F/5-6.3 APO DG
Approximate street price: $800
Ditto the Sigma 50-500mm; non-HSM also means that it has slower autofocus.

Tamron 200-500mm F/5-6.3 Di LD IF
Approximate street price: $900
Ditto the Sigma 50-500mm.

Tripods and tripod heads

You can get good value lenses from 3rd party producers, but the same is simply not true with tripods. Do not skimp on the tripod. Your pictures will be blurry and you may as well not have spent thousands of dollars on a big lens. Maybe you could get away with a bad tripod if you buy an image stabilized lens, but if you can spend an extra several thousand dollars for image stabilization you can spend an extra few hundred bucks on the best tripod you can buy. Gitzo carbon fiber tripods are the best: sturdy and light weight. They are also pricey, costing about $500. You can buy heavier non-carbon fiber tripods, but to be honest, super telephoto lenses are heavy enough as they are and I don’t think it’s worth saving $200 or $300 to get a wooden or aluminum tripod instead of a carbon fiber and having to carry around an extra 3-5 (or more) pounds. The best Gitzo tripods are the 1325 (now replaced with the GT3530), 1348 and 1548. You might be able to pick one up used for a lower price, but used ones are pretty hard to come by.

You have some more flexibility with tripod heads. There are two types of heads that are most popular with nature photographers: ball heads and gimbal style heads. Ball heads are great all around since you can use them with both wideangle and telephoto lenses, but they are considerably harder to use with super telephoto lenses because these lenses are heavy and become unbalanced on ball heads. Gimbal heads are specifically designed for super telephoto lenses, which they are amazing for, but they are essentially useless for any other lenses. So which tripod head you want is up to you; as with everything there are tradeoffs.

Gimbal heads on the whole are phenomenally expensive. Wimberley is generally the best regarded brand, and they go for $600 (around $400-500 for a used one) plus quick release plates running at about $100 each. That seemed a bit excessive to me, so I sprung for the only cheaper option, the Bogen 3421, which you can get for $170 and includes one quick release plate. The Bogen is not perfect but has no significant flaws that I’ve found (review will be up soon), and I’m overall very satisfied with it and think it’s a great value.

Summary

By buying used, 3rd party, and/or manual focus lenses, you can get yourself a legitimate super telephoto lens kit (complete with tripod and tripod head) for $2000-2500. That is clearly a lot of money, but it’s a lot less than what you might think you have to pay if you look at most photography vendors’ websites. Considering that you can get a setup that is quite similar to what pros are using or were using a few years ago, I also think it’s a great value. Super telephoto lenses are hard to use and a pain to carry around, but if you do wildlife photography for long enough you will probably find your photography feeling constrained by a lack of focal length. Hopefully the strategies I outlined here will help you get the equipment you want without having to file for Chapter 11.

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