I am in the throes of trying to decide whether to totally give up taking pictures of wildlife with long zoom lenses.  I have made the decision to change to a lighter weight camera with prime lenses to reduce the size and weight of my gear … at least for the events I photograph here at Homewood.  If all works well, I will be using a Fuji X-T1 with two or three prime lenses to replace my Canon 70D with lenses between 17 mm and 255 mm.

I have two options that I’m considering for my other photography.  First is to keep my Nikon J5 and lenses as my second camera.  If I go that route I could still use my Nikon one inch sensor camera for wildlife and flower images like above which were all taken with it at 110 mm and then cropped and resized.  The second option is to sell the Nikon 1 system and keep my Leica X2 or Ricoh GR primarily as a backup camera and use my X-T1 with a few prime lenses for all of my photography.  If I take the second route I will have no long focal length lenses for wildlife.  The first option gives me more opportunities for different types of pictures and the second option retains a higher quality camera and forces me to learn how to get the most out of wide-to-normal prime lenses and photograph exclusively with them.

It is coming down to sticking to what I have mostly done in the past when I used long focal length zoom lenses, but with lower quality, or forcing myself to learn what I can photograph exclusively with wide-to-normal prime lenses with a better camera and lenses.  My long zoom capability has been my crutch in the past when I didn’t know what I was going to photograph.  I always seemed to be able to extract an image from a distance out of the overall larger view.  Prime lenses would force me to get up close.

I am waiting for the new camera to be delivered so that I can spend some time using it and see which choice I prefer to make:  only using shorter prime lenses with better image quality, or keeping an option for longer focal length images albeit with lower image quality.