Published 06/25/2018

Introduction

I recently was in the UK as part of my PhD and decided to head up to the Farne Islands (as well as Bempton Cliffs) to see the puffins (as well as razorbill and guillemots, and gannets at Bempton). Puffins are one of my favorite birds, and having previously photographed them at the Farne Islands, I was really excited to get another crack at them. In particular, I was hoping to get more shots of them head on and banking, with sandeels of course to send it over the top.

Since I was traveling around for work, I wanted to go light on the camera gear, so I just brought a gripped D500, a Nikon 300mm f/4 PF, and a 1.4 teleconverter, all which fit inside a small camera bag in my regular work backpack. While the 300 PF has been out for about 2.5 years now, it's a recent addition to my kit and one I was really curious about as in my mind it could make the perfect shorebird / seabird in flight lens provided you're in a situation with a number of opportunities as it is small (5.8 inches), fast (f/4), and light (1.67 pounds). For it to actually live up to that, it has to have fast autofocus (AF), have top notch image quality (IQ), be responsive, be balanced physically, and take a teleconverter well both in terms of IQ and AF. With that said, if I was aiming to photograph raptors in flight, especially with limited passes, I would opt for the longest focal length I could muster, so YMMV.

As mentioned, the 300 PF has been around since 2015 with a number of really great reviews already written, so I won't dwell on the technical specifications very much, but I haven't seen a detailed review on using this lens for bird in flight, a genre of photography I'm interested in and get a lot of questions about, so hopefully this will be useful to some.

In the sections that follow I'll present a ton of images (click to see them larger), some 100% unsharpened crops (1:1 pixel to pixel images) of the corresponding RAW files with no noise reduction applied, and then my general thoughts on the lens based on just the trip for Farne Islands. I've tried not to cherry pick 100% crops based on just the sharpest but rather a representative sample of the images posted, while not bogging it down too much. If you're just interested in the images, skim and scroll though and feel free to ignore the 100% crops and technical musings.

All images were processed in Nikon Capture NX-D and Photoshop CC 2018. If you want to know how I process my images starting at the RAW point, you can read a short tutorial here.

Field results

As soon as you land on the islands you immediately see how close you can get to the Puffins, generally within about 10 feet if you want without implementing much field craft (i.e. you can walk right up to them). This gives ample opportunities to get head shots and really work the proper sun angle if you don't have an overcast day.

This puffin here had no issues with a close approach using just the bare 300mm lens. Here, the background was the ocean.