Whether you’ve wanted to click birds at your local park or some fancy winged wonders at foreign conservation reserves, seeing the costs of long telephoto lenses can put you off from wanting to buy them. We’ve rounded up a set of lenses that will make your birding photography options more accessible and affordable for everyone. These won’t be as pricey as some super telephoto primes can be, and the pricing on some of our choices here might be downright surprising to you.

How We Test and Choose the Best Affordable Birding Lenses

• The Phoblographer’s various product round-up features are done in-house. Our philosophy is simple: you wouldn’t get a Wagyu beef steak review from a lifelong vegetarian. And you wouldn’t get photography advice from someone who doesn’t touch the product. We only recommend gear we’ve fully reviewed in these roundups.
• If you’re wondering why your favorite product didn’t make the cut, there’s a chance it’s on another list. If we haven’t reviewed it, we won’t recommend it. This method keeps our lists packed with industry-leading knowledge. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. You can read more about our ethics on this on our Disclaimer page.
• When we test products we’ve got various things in mind. First off, we consider who might want to buy the product and what they might do with it. With that in mind, we try to tackle at least three genres of photography with that product in a variety of situations. For example, if a lens has weather resistance, then we’ll test it accordingly with a weather-resistant camera. We also test the autofocus of the lens in continuous mode, single mode, with exposure preview effects, without those effects, and then with all the major image quality parameters. These days, no one really makes a bad lens — but some are far better than others. And that’s what we’re trying to find in our reviews.
• In all of our roundups, we’re basing our findings on the reviews that we’ve done. We’re choosing a favorite, but we’re also giving photographers a bunch of others that they might like, depending on how they shoot.

Our Choice Amongst the Best Affordable Birding Lenses Of 2024: Canon RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.1 L IS USM

We love our telephoto lenses here at The Phoblographer. And we’re excited to be testing out some of the newer releases in the coming months. But in recent times, no other telephoto lens won our hearts as much as Canon’s RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.1 lens did. It weighs only around 3 lbs and is less than a foot long when zoomed in, which makes it super convenient to carry around for long hours. And it feels really well-built too in your hands. Canon mirrorless users who want to look at getting their first telephoto zoom can seriously consider this one.

Tech Specs

These specs are taken from the Adorama Listing

What We Think

In our review, we state:

Canon RF 100-500mm f4.5-7.1 L IS USM is an excellent lens. There isn’t really a single flaw about it. It’s compact compared to some competitors, the image quality is wonderful, and it’s weather sealed. And $2,699 for what you’re getting isn’t too awful of a price point, though it’s also not a no-brainer purchase. For what this lens is, it’s exemplary, and I think that any serious birding photographer will really enjoy it

This lens took home our Editor’s Choice Award. It’s really that fantastic.

For Some Photographers, These Might Be The Best Affordable Birding Lenses To Choose From

I get it, affordable is a very subjective word. But rest assured, these lenses are all considerably cheaper than having to buy a car (many of which these days can be cheaper than some telephoto lenses I have my eye on). Here are some lenses across various brands that you can trust to give you fast autofocus (when used with capable cameras) and great image results

Sony 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS Super Telephoto

There is quite a few things that make this lens a worthy addition to your Sony kit bag, as we noted in our review

The Sony 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS Super Telephoto combines snappy and precise autofocusing performance, robust build quality, and stellar image quality into a superb lens that is worthy of being added to any sports and wildlife photographer’s arsenal. The fact that Sony was able to keep it relatively lightweight and compact just adds to its versatility. Sony Full Frame Mirrorless shooter specializing in sports and wildlife photography, you will definitely want to get your hands on the Sony 200-600mm f5.6-6.3 G OSS.

Fujifilm 150-600mm f5.6-8 R LM OIS WR

Fujifilm has a wonderful option, but it does come with some limitations as we observed during our review:

The Fujifilm 150-600mm f5.6-8 R LM OIS WR finally brings big telephoto capabilities to X Mount. And, since that’s a crop sensor mount, this lens offers a focal length difficult to find on full-frame options. The lens delivers Fujifilm’s lovely color science on more distant subjects, like sports and wildlife. While the reach is long, the lens is compact enough that photographers can still hike with it. And an excellent stabilization system means the hike doesn’t have to include a tripod. While the lens offers a big reach for the X-Mount, quality is best at the wider and middle range. The f8 on the long end means pushing the ISO to get the shutter fast enough for moving subjects. That, mixed with some corner softness at 600mm, makes getting a sharp shot at 600mm challenging. Buyers should also beware that it’s not fully compatible with any X-mount camera — it’s listed for the X-H2s, X-T4, X-T3, and X-S10. With other bodies, the extra controls on the lens are incompatible.

Panasonic Leica 100-400mm f4-6.3 II

This lens works well within the few quirks we observed during our tests with it. But on the cool side, it has 1:2 macro capabilities. In our review we noted:

The Panasonic Leica 100-400mm f4-6.3 II is a prime example of both the advantages and limitations of Micro Four Thirds. The lens offers an incredible reach considering it is closer in size to a 70-200 than an 800mm equivalent. For sports and wildlife, this lens can get photographers close to the action because it’s small enough to hike with or navigate the sidelines with. Add in beautiful colors, sharp details, a Leica metal build, weather-sealing, and a reasonable price, and the lens is easily a win. But, on the flip side, the f6.3 aperture on the long end and the Micro Four Thirds sensor is a challenge for sports and wildlife. Freezing the movement of birds on an overcast day requires really pushing that ISO up high, and if you come across wildlife at dusk, even ISO 12800 isn’t enough to freeze the movement. The autofocus miss rate also seemed a little high considering the narrower depth of field. While the 1:2 macro focusing capabilities are excellent, a macro position on the focus limiter would have been beneficial.

Nikon Z 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 VR S

Nikon has been bringing out some versatile lenses for its Z-mount camera owners, and this one took four stars in our review:

The portability and semi-palatable price point makes the Nikon Z 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 a solid choice for many wildlife and action photographers. While there’s less bokeh than the Z 400mm f4.5 or the 400mm f2.8, the lens is easy to shoot handheld and it fits in a typical camera bag. Image quality is excellent with great sharpness and color.

Sigma 60-600mm f4.5-6.3 DG DN OS Sports

If 3x or even 5x zoom telephoto lenses aren’t enough magnification for you, why not check out this 10x model from Sigma. You’ll miss out on some sharpness as we found out during our review:

OM System 40-150mm f4 Pro

If you’re an OM System camera user, you’d probably have quite a few options already. But this one we felt is the best of the lost. In our review we said:

The OM System 40-150mm f4 Pro delivers the sharpness of a Pro line lens in a smaller, more affordable package. It’s simple to use, easy to carry around on long hikes, and I even dunked it under a faucet to no ill effects. This lens is pretty durable and feels great in the hands. The images are sharp and the lens flare is fun to work with. But, there are a few sacrifices to get to that smaller size. An f4 lens on Micro Four Thirds means higher ISOs for photographing action, which translates into more noise and less detail.

Tamron 50-400mm f4.5-6.3 Di III VC VXD

The last on our list here, but by no means the least of the lot is Tamron’s highly capable 50-400mm. We found it to give the same sharpness as comparable Sony G Master lenses, as we said in our review:

If you want Sony-level sharpness without the price of a G Master lens and a wide zoom range, buy the Tamron 50-400mm. Image quality leaves very little to complain about. And, with a focal range starting at 50mm, it’s a nice complement to the typical focal lengths of a kit lens. If versatility, portability, affordability, and sharpness are important, this lens is an excellent option.

Using This Guide to the Best Birding Lenses

If you’re considering purchasing anything from this list of the best macro lenses, consider the following:

• All the product images and sample photos in these roundups are shot by our staff. In fact, we don’t talk about products at length in roundups like this unless we’ve done full reviews of them. But you can surely know that we’ve done all the research ourselves.
• Laowa probably makes the best 3rd party macro lenses right now. But they aren’t without their shortcomings, as we noted above
• Does macro photography mystify you? Look at our quick guide to understand it better
• Macro photography autofocus accuracy also depends a great deal on the camera system you’re using
• The best macro photos are taken with a methodology called Focus Stacking
• We’d never recommend a product to you that we haven’t tested or that we really didn’t like. You can reference our linked reviews, for more information on this.

Picking the Right One For You

If you’re still a bit confused as to the right birding lens for you, here are some questions to ask yourself

• What’s your budget?
• How will you use the product?
• What lighting situations are you in, and how will that affect what you’re doing? Our reviews hyperlinked in this article can help with that.
• Are you traveling a lot with it?
• Will you be using it in a situation that’s a bit rougher?
• Who else uses this product? How are they using it?
• What’s so appealing about this product that I can’t get from what I have already or something else?
• When will I really have time to use this product?
• Where will I bring this product?
• How will this product help bring me joy and joy in my photography?

REEL: AXIS, NOT POLES & DYKE HANDS, QUEER SHORTS

Reel: Axis, Not Poles is a month-long screening programme curated by Languid Hands featuring experimental moving image shorts by five Black artists from across the diaspora. Inspired by Teshome Gabriel’s writing in Thoughts On Nomadic Aesthetics And The Black Independent Cinema: Traces of a Journey (1988), “these artists create work that is not purely reactive to cultures of oppression, nor hindered by the burden of visual representation”. Instead, they use their own references and approaches to creating a “visual, sonic, and textural language”, that moves “towards a liberated culture of art-making”. The artists included are Che Applewhaite, Dita Hashi, Kondo Heller, S*an D. Henry-Smith, and Kadeem Oak.

On Wednesday, 23 March, from 7pm, Languid Hands presents a selection of shorts from Cinenova’s collection, which are either made by or centre Black, lesbian, and non-binary people. This selection, screened over one night, is inspired by S. Diane Bogus’ 1989 book of poems and essays, DYKE HANDS & SUTRAS EROTIC & LYRIC. Artists included will be Jamika Ajalon, L Franklin Gilliam, and Sonali Fernando.

Reel: Axis, Not Poles runs March 10 – April 2, 2024 (Thursday-Saturday, 11am-6pm). Dyke Hands, Queer Shorts runs on the  March 23 from 7-9pm. More information here and here.

Exteriors at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (until 25 May 2024) expresses the ineffable experience of modern, urban life

March 01, 2024

The dominant perception of early photography from West Africa is that it was taken through a colonizing lens. Of Europeans in the mid-19th century spreading through the arteries of the region, new technology in hand, documenting people and places under the aegis of empire. Of a balance of power that favored the person behind the camera over the person in front of it, authoring a story for Europeans, by Europeans.

But what if that image were only partly true? What if that story was merely one of many – and one that conceals a more complex and empowered story that West Africa claimed for itself?

These are questions asked by a new book that seeks to re-examine the history of photography in the region. Giulia Paoletti, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia, has built a timeline in “Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960,” unearthing unpublished gems, giving authorship to images long labelled anonymous, and dispelling many myths.

“The narrative that is told about the history of photography is that it is a Western invention, and then at some point it gets appropriated by Africans,” she told CNN in a video interview. Her book demonstrates that gap was short, and history has been obscured in a way that has disenfranchised many Africans.

“We have these histories,” she said, “and what I’m trying very hard to do is recuperate some of them.”

Beyond the colonial narrative

For more than a decade the academic conducted research trips to Senegal, interviewing hundreds of people, including the surviving relatives of the country’s canonical photographers, uncovering lost stories and context attached to their work. “I had a lot of enthusiasm and support, mostly based on (the) Senegalese being very proud of this history and heritage they want to share,” said Paoletti.

“I was always aware of my position as an outsider,” she added, and accordingly, “never had the ambition to ‘represent Senegal.’”

“My ambition is to amplify the voice of and offer more visibility to Senegalese authors, artists, and collections, and de-center Eurocentric perspectives, starting (with) mine.”

The book begins in 1842 with the earliest surviving photograph from West Africa, a daguerreotype taken by Frenchman Jules Itier of the port town of St. Louis. The image doesn’t show us much, other than a few colonial buildings, a square and a couple of ghostly figures straying into the frame. Itier described it as a “missed shot,” but it’s evidence of how quickly commercial photography, invented just three years prior, spread around the world.

It wasn’t long before Senegalese people were calling the shots. Unlike some other West African nations, Senegal has no recorded history of portraiture before photography, Paoletti said. But by the 1850s, a class of Senegalese women that existed from the 17th to 19th century called the signare – Black or mixed race, and often married to colonial officers – were commissioning portraits in St. Louis, the seat of power in French West Africa.

“The sitters in this case have a lot of agency,” said Paoletti. “It’s not a surprise that two of the earliest portraits … are of women. It was not unusual for (signare) women to have that status, and photography would be one of the means to express that.”

Outside of colonial circles, a different picture emerges. Paoletti tells the story of Belgian explorer Adolphe Burdo meeting a man he described as the “King of Dakar” in 1878.

At the meeting, the king handed Burdo a keepsake called a “carte de visite,” featuring a photo portrait that the king that had commissioned of himself. Confronted by this modern African, the Belgian fled “too civilized” Dakar “to go in quest of more genuine savages,” Paoletti reports Burdo writing. The same carte de visite was turned into an illustration and distributed in Burdo’s published travelogue. In doing so, a European erased this African’s modernity.

“There is shock and there is resistance,” said Paoletti – an attitude that reverberates today, she argues, in the scarcity of early African photography in many museums, that favor art in older mediums instead. “You will rarely see early engagement with modernity,” said the author.

“Historically, Africa, African subjects and African objects, have tended to be constructed and maintained outside of time, in this timeless space,” she argued. “There is always this construction of the ‘Other’ that never co-exists in our time.”

Nevertheless, it is well documented that the first (albeit temporary) photography studio in Senegal was set up by a Black man, African American Augustus Washington, in 1860, and at the turn of the 20^th century photography was relatively widespread in the country, writes Paoletti.

Finding comparisons around the world

From the 1930s, photography found a unique social function in Senegal via the “xoymet,” a Wolof word for a decorative collage associated with weddings. Photographs of friends and family would be collected and used to furnish a bride’s room ahead of the ceremony, Paoletti writes. People would visit, and this symbol of the bride’s social circle would prompt conversation, then after the wedding the collage would be taken down and the photographs returned.

“If you talk about photography in Senegal it will come up all the time,” the author said, “but there’s very little research on it.”

Academics don’t know why the practice died out in the 1960s, she added, and only around a dozen photographs of xoymet survive. Notable examples were taken by Macky Kane, including of his bride-to-be Fatou Thioune sitting in front of her xoymet.

“We see this format, of photographs within photographs, in very important photographs, such as ‘Sun Rays­–Paula, Berlin,’” she explained – an image taken by pioneering American Alfred Stieglitz in the late 19^th century.

To Paoletti, it’s evidence photography in West Africa didn’t evolve in isolation. “We need to see these photographs in relation,” Paoletti said. “We need to see how they’re connected in the world, and how the people who sit in front (of the xoymet in these photographs) want to be part of those worlds.”

Today, Macky Kane and compatriots Mama Casset and Salla Casset are widely celebrated for their mid-20^th century portraiture, collected by museums including The Met. This was not always the case, said Paoletti. However, an “explosion” of exhibitions of African photography (including key exhibitions in the US and Senegal) in the 1990s, as well as pivotal 1998 book “Anthology of African Photography,” did a significant job in bringing many of their photographs to a broader audience (even if some images were listed as by “anonymous”).

As if to prove the riches still to be unearthed, Paoletti visited the holy city of Touba between 2012 and 2019 and interviewed Oumar Ka, a respected mid-century photographer. Ka, who died in 2020, “still lived by his old studio, and he kept his whole archive of negatives. He had these incredible portraits from the 1960s of rural sitters that I’d never seen before,” said Paoletti.

It was, she said, a “transformative moment.” Some of these photographs, composed in wide shots with deep depth of field, with subjects (or Ka) in natural surroundings, don’t just look modern but contemporary, and starkly different from other major West African photographers’ work at the time.

But for every photo that is found, others remain lost. No daguerreotypes taken by Augustus Washington during his time in Senegal have been discovered, Paoletti said, while some works by Mama Casset will presumably never surface, after a fire in the 1980s consumed his studio, which contained most of his negatives.

Paoletti intends to present her project in the Senegalese capital at the Dakar Biennale later this year, with book talks at the Institut Français du Sénégal and University of Dakar. And after sinking over a decade into the book, her mission continues, not only for a deeper understanding of Senegal’s photographic past, but its rightful place in history.

“Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960” is published by Princeton University Press and released on March 5.

Photographer Marcus Lister’s ongoing project shares the stories of young Ukrainian artists, drag queens, DJs, and dancers making art and organising festivals, raves, and balls during wartime