Lens Recommendations for Tanzania & Rwanda Safari

[coasterd1]

Just purchased R7 which Lenses would be go to  use  Rf  100-500mm , 24-105 ,100-200 with extender ,

or new 100-300mm  2.8 ? Renting  lenses 

Thank for your Help !

David

[Tronhard]

Hi and welcome to the forum:
Great you are going on a photo safari, it's a great adventure and you should get some brilliant photo opportunities.

So, to clarify things and give you the best advice, can you offer some detail please?
1. What lens or lenses do you have at present?
2. Is the need for long telephotos going to be a rare occurrence, or something you are going to require regularly?
3. Which part of the world are you travelling from to go to the safari?
4. Are you going with a safari company or on your own?

To clarify why these questions are relevant:
1.  If you have an existing lens then it is helpful to let us know so we can consider that factor
2.  If you don't have an intention to need the lenses for this kind of activity in the long term, then renting should be seriously considered.  Long telephotos are not cheap, and if you can get the use of one for a while, without the cost and risk of ownership, then it's definitely worth looking at.  If you are going to buy, then your budget is going to be important to consider.
3. If you are travelling internationally, the costs, inconvenience and risks of damage or loss during transit might make looking at hiring locally at the safari location worthy of investigation. 
4. If you are going with an established company, then they may actually offer a lens rental service, which would be the most convenient and has the added benefit that if necessary they may let you rent different lenses as you need them.

Generally, for safari work, I would recommend a long telephoto lens.  So, with the rental considerations aside, these are the lenses the I would consider worthy of consideration.

RF 100-400 USM - one of the cheaper lenses in the RF line but a good performer and quite light and not too bulky.  It will make use of the R7 IBIS and animal tracking, which are great benefits.  It is not really weather sealed, so you might want to consider some kind of protective cover to protect it from dust and moisture.

RF 100-500L USM.  This is a brilliant lens. Dual Nano-USM motors make it blazing fast to focus and it is weather sealed with professional-grade optics.  It IS much more expensive - something like 4x the cost of the RF 100-400 but is a top performer, and of course you get the extra reach.

However, it's not all about long reach.  You could well come across situations where you want to shoot landscapes or your animal subjects are way too close for a telephoto, in which case a different lens might well be necessary.
As a longer-term purchase buying a general walk-around lens is a good investment.
Units to consider would be:
RF 24-105  - there two versions of this which are worthy of consideration but the L version, while weather-sealed and with a constant aperture, is again more expensive.
RF 24-240 -  The 10x zoom of this lens makes it a great general purpose lens that will cover a wide range of applications, and could well be a long-term purchase.  I have one and it performs extremely well. 
Canon RF-S 18-150mm f3.5-6.3 IS  is another good kit lens for you APS-C camera to provide a flexible walk-around and general purpose optic.

If you are getting a non-L series lens, then I would definitely consider getting a lens hood. Frustratingly, Canon don't provide these with non-L lenses, but you can get OEM or much cheaper 3rd party units via the web.

A note on other things:
a)  Getting good shots from an event such as this is as much, if not more so about learning about animal behaviour - both for your safety and that of the animal, and to be able to anticipate what an animal or group of them may do.  Furthermore, you will much more out of the experience itself, if you understand something of the animals, their behaviours and threats.  So, my advice is to study a lot - look a documentaries about African wildlife: the BBC's Attenborough documentaries are an excellent resource for that, as may be National Geographic videos, and just generally searching on You Tube.  One excellent resource is Pangolin Wildlife, which runs safaris - they have lots of great advice and info on photographing wildlife and also likely have a video on how to configure your R7 for wildlife photography.
b)  Get to know your camera.  Set it up for wildlife photography and take lots of pictures.  Get to the stage you can reach for a control without having to consciously think about it.  It you have to take time to look for a control, you may well miss a critical moment.  Also, download the PDF of the Advanced User Guide, both to study beforehand, and to have on a tablet or laptop for reference. You can find the PDF here:
https://cam.start.canon/en/C005/manual/c005.pdf

Finally, make sure you have uploaded the latest firmware for the R7 and any lens that you may be taking with you.  You can find the latest download here:
https://www.usa.canon.com/support/p/eos-r7
Of course you will want to take spare batteries, lots of cards and something to download your photos to as well.

I hope that this is of some help.

[coasterd1 · Accepted solution]

Thanks TREVOR,

Currently only have kit lens18-150mm f3.5-6.3,So definitely going to rent lens ,But unsure witch to rent.              Question thinking 100-500 ,But 100-300mm f2.8 with extenders great range with lower Fstop see below

But on 100-500  were is F stop with crop 151 lens  camera 241 and 254 -406 363-580 is that a correct assumption. But cost to rent with ins includes damage & theft 100-500 $240.where as 100-300 Dramatically     more $886. But far lower F-stop ?Do I need lower f-stop?                                                                                    Thanks once again for your help!

David

    

[coasterd1]

sorry forgot  never been on Safari so don't know need telephoto all time assume .Traveling from Chicago

Safari Tour company Access2Tanzania both locations private tour

Thanks again

David

[Tronhard]

Thanks for responding.

I would suggest retaining the kit lens and renting the 100-500L lens if you can afford it.  I would NOT get the 100-400 with extender for a couple of reasons:
1) extenders generally reduce the image quality and of course you lose at least a stop of light.
2) Extenders reduce the weather sealing of the camera, and with a unit like the R7 (which does not have much) this increased the chance of getting dust on the sensor which will be seen on your images.

Mirrorless cameras these days can deal with higher ISO values than previous models, and in the case of the R7 I would suggest you set the ISO to auto, with a maximum value of 3200 ISO.

To give you a quick comment on lens performance: the RF100-500 f/4.5-7.1 compares better in both range and speed to the RF 100-400 f/5.6-8 by about a stop, so you are better off with the more expensive optic and its longer focal length.  If you were to add a 1.4x extender (which would cost you to rent or buy) it would change the base f/stops of the 100-400 to f/8 - f/11, so the diagram you present would be invalid for that scenario and the lens would be slower by one stop across that range, and would only result in an effective increase of FL to140-560mm - so you lose at the wider end (which could be very useful) and gain only 60mm at the long end.  I would not add an extender to the 100-500 as it means the lens with the extender attached will only shoot from 300mm because there is a mechanical stop, so you might be looking at an on/off cycle that is again only going to increase the risk of dust infiltration.

Then we come to the question of Equivalence.  The actual Field of View that your lens + sensor will capture. Since you are using an APS-C lens, the actual FoV is equivalent to using a lens with a FL 1.6x the value of the optic,  and also increased the effective f/stop by about 1 value. So the range of FoV would be as follows:

RF 100-400       FoV Equivalent = 160 -640mm f/8-f/11  With extender 1.4x = 224 - 896mm f/11-f/16
RF 100-500       FoV Equivalent = 160 - 800mm, f/5.6-f/8

Now, consider the conditions.  The southern African continent is likely to be very brightly lit, so your shooting conditions should not require high ISO values.  If you are concerned about isolating your subject remember that the three things that impact DoF are:
The closer the subject, the smaller the DoF
The longer the FL, the smaller the DoF
The smaller the f/stop, the smaller the DoF.

My point being that considering the f/stop alone is not going to be valid because your shutter speeds may be high and ISO values quite low because of the light intensity.  If you want, set the ISO to auto as I suggested and shoot in Av mode so you can control the aperture - I suspect that most of the time you will have no problem.

[coasterd1]

Thanks again Trevor

No other lens I was talking about new rf100-300 F2.8 chart of f-stops below email  but costly to rent new 9000. Was curious if needed low f-stops lens or what to do in low light

David

[Tronhard]

The new lens RF100-300 is short on focal range for a start, which is much more important for wildlife, especially with macro mammals.  As I said there should be plenty of light normally.  If you are intending to shooting in very low light, I would recommend taking a monopod, but given the higher ISO performance, you are likely not to need it unless you are shooting in very, very dark conditions.

[Tintype_18]

Good luck. Any chance of seeing some photos?

Story: Many years ago, a fellow went to Africa to take movies (before video) of the land and the animals. He shot several thousand feet of film (dates it, doesn't it?) and got back to the States. When the film was developed, it was all blank. He didn't "practice" before leaving and didn't remove the lens cover!

[coasterd1]

Thanks

David

[Tronhard]

Actually, you don't mark your responses as the solution, you mark the post that gives the answer to your question, so that others can find it easily. 🙂