Quote Originally Posted by 4mozasmiles View Post
Thanks again for the helpful information and the great tutorial. I suspected that you were able to get fairly close. This is an example of one from the weekend - I am trying to decide if 600mm would provide the framing I like (I borrowed a 400mm and added a 1.4x for this shot - 560mm). The camera was probably about 12ft from the bird - and I still felt it needed to be cropped.

This is the version with cropping and minor LR and NIK adjustments.
I can tell you that when it comes to birds, more focal length is better in almost all cases. Getting closer is better as well. In this case you will notice that even though you had to crop a little the image quality did not suffer....that's what more focal length and getting close will do!

I think what it boils down to is that the longer focal length combined with close proximity gets you more pixels on the subject and hence better IQ. I would love to have the version 600mm. I think that lens with the option of using teleconverters is probably the best and most verstile kit for bird photography that you could have....it's very pricey however