Gear
Philosophy
For the first 4 years of my photography journey I shot on Canon systems, starting with a Canon 1300D. A year later I upgraded to a Canon 7d mark II with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM. Despite its age I’d still recommend this setup in a heartbeat to anyone wanting to venture into wildlife photography: it’s widely available on the used market while having some serious quality and flexibility for a fraction of the price of today’s prime gear.
However, there came a moment in 2021 where I found myself longing for more yet no reasonable option was in reach. On one hand, my 7D mark II body was showing its age and I felt more and more limited by its high-ISO noise capacity and slower autofocus. On the other, a prime 500mm f/4 was a serious economic decision beyond anything I had invested so far, with very little availability on the used market. And with the industry’s on-going paradigm shift toward mirrorless system, there was no guarantee I still wouldn’t need to invest into more gear soon after.
So, after another year of reflection, I took a leap of faith and decided to completely switch systems. In spring 2022 I bought a Sony A9 II camera with the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS. It’s a much larger investment than anything before, but one that reflects my own commitment to photography and how much this hobby has grown into my daily life. To say that I am satisfied would be an understatement: the move to full-frame, let alone to such a high-range camera, took my photography to levels of details I never achieved before. Of course, nothing comes from gear alone and this can also be credited to years of improvement, research and reading about imaging science, gear specificities and composing theory.
I may still revisit the idea of getting a fast prime lens in the future, though the idea of a bulkier 500 or 600mm becomes less and less appealing to me. Rather, I may invest into a hyper-fast 400mm f/2.8 and a teleconverter.
List
Body: Sony A9 II
Lenses:
Support:
Clothing & extras:
Post-processing
Philosophy
I have been using Adobe Lightroom Classic since I started taking images. It’s an amazing product with just the right amount of complexity to it and straightforward editing and archiving tools. The Topaz AI products made waves in the world of wildlife photography these last years, and for good reason. They are hands down the best way to remove noise from an image and have a result as close as what the eye was seeing at the moment it was taken. Both Topaz Denoise and Topaz Sharpen are now a staple of my editing, and I very recently added Gigapixel to it for delivering prints of the highest quality.
As I started diving a bit more into the Adobe suite and included these various third-party programs, I also realized I needed an extra flexibility Lightroom wasn’t always providing. I have hence since included Photoshop as part of my routine software for edits. This is often the part where people outside of the hobby frown, as the name has a bad reputation being essentially associated with faking elements of the images rather than just editing them.
One of my main goals in photography is to approach living subjects with the most artistic angle I can in a given set of conditions, to showcase their natural beauty. This is therefore where I draw the line: while there is intrinsically no problem with composites or altered images, I have major issues with the amount of content where this is not disclosed and the image is treated as in-camera result, something even more emphasized by the current social media era and the chase after virtual clout.
My editing routine focuses only on drawing the best from the wealth of information recorded by the camera and stored in the RAW files. Base tone (exposure, highlights, shadows), temperature and lens profile corrections are done in Lightroom, and the image is then taken into Photoshop. Successive passes in Topaz Denoise and Topaz Sharpen are used to remove noise from the almost-unaltered file, and stored as duplicate layers so that I can remove artifacts when needed. Then, only base editing is done in the form of additional Photoshop layers: local curves & levels adjustments, vibrancy & saturation, brightness, and contrast. There may be some rare images where I’ll remove small elements of the background in immediate proximity of the animal, but those are few and far between and will always be disclosed (and of course, not entered in any contest). Then, I return into Lightroom for cropping and framing of the final image.
