Even more important to excellent bird photography than having the right camera is having the right lens. There is no point in purchasing that dream camera body and crippling yourself with a cheap lens. In the 8 years I've been leading digital photo safaris I've had the chance to use or at least see used just about every likely lens made for Nikon and Canon camera bodies and have plenty of hopefully useful thoughts to share with you:

We just finished another successful Texas Bird Photo Safari. I'll be writing more later in the week but since so many of you are curious about the Sigma 120-400mm Telephoto Zoom lens I wanted to let you know that it was a complete success.

This article is a work in progress, as there is plenty more to say, but since this is a frequent topic in our forums and others I thought I'd start by reposting my reply to a question on the colortheory mailing list:

>
> But in a raw file, haven't you got about another two stops at either
> end that are recoverable using the exposure slider, on top of the
> standard exposure?
> Read more »