New Oly 100-400 at the zoo

This last series I shot in the Tropical Rainforest exhibit, with my favorite animals in the whole zoo as subjects: the two Blue and Gold Macaws. Sometimes they hang out together, but on Friday they occupied different perches that were out of sight of each other. In both cases, I was about 12 to 15 feet (4-5 m) away from the birds.

For each of these images, I used a focal length of 400 mm and an aperture of f/6.3. I changed the ISO to force a change in the shutter speed. I have arranged these images from the fastest shutter speed to the slowest. I shot standing up when the shutter speeds were 1/100 or faster. For the two images with longer shutter speeds, I sat on a low bench and braced my elbows on my knees. It worked.

An ISO of 3200 produced a shutter speed of 1/200. The fine detail seems to be decent at this ISO (it wasn’t too good at 6,400 and higher, which I also tried but am not showing here).

Dropping the ISO to 1600 lengthened the shutter speeds to 1/125 and 1/100 (next image), respectively. Three stops of lens IS is equivalent to 1/800, which is what “The Rule” tells us is appropriate for a 400-mm MFT lens.

See comment for previous image.

Dropping the ISO to 800 while catching a little extra light through a hole in the clouds kept the shutter speed at 1/100.

Next, dropping the ISO to 400 produced shutter speeds of 1/40 and 1/30 (next image), respectively. Here, I braced my elbows on my knees.

See comment for previous image.

I don’t know about y’all, but I think all six macaw images turned out really good.

One final note, I think the bokeh with this lens is really nice.