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:

Contributed by Paul Janosi

[EDITORS  Note: Correct exposure has become nearly a religious issue with the advent of the "expose to the right" mantra for many raw shooters. But not everyone sees exposure the same way. Thanks to newsletter reader Paul Janosi for contributing this article with his thoughts on tuning exposure on your high-end D-SLR and even more importantly his meticulous technique for fine tuning your AF system for use with your long lenses and Teleconverters. I tried it with my 200-400f/4 and my TC-14E (both of which had just been serviced and aligned by Nikon) and found that indeed a correction to AF improved the sharpness of my images noticeably--David]   Read more »

All it takes is standing alongside a road or in a park next to a long lens to draw shouts of "what are you shooting, the moon?" But as any wildlife photographer knows a telephoto isn't used just to photograph objects that are far away... Read more »

I've always been a little jealous of the possibility of stacking Teleconverters which Canon shooters seem to be able to do more easily than Nikon photographers. At the same time I've been puzzling over how to get my mind around having a D300 and a D700. Then yesterday on the pier at Padre Island it hit me... Read more »

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.