Hey, pssst, wanna see my duck?
After a week of sales pitching and trying to justify the investment to myself I decided to just go for it, I sold a kidney (no worries it wasn't mine) and bought the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3. Part of the sales pitch was my three week road trip through Sweden that was coming up.
Now, to avoid any confusion further on, I'm pairing this lens with a crop sensor camera, the Sony 6700 so I will be referring to the focal lengths as they are on my crop sensor. The 200-600mm effectively becomes a 300-900mm.
I prefer buying full frame lenses because of their increased quality and sharpness and because my wife uses a Sony full frame camera.
Just before my trip I had been checking out plenty of wildlife photographers so safe to say, I was seriously hyped for Sweden.
The thing is, I had created this romantic image of lurking in the woods for hours at a time trying to capture a moose, a fox or even a bear but the reality is, I didn’t see any of those things.
The first week I barely saw any wildlife, not even birds. To be honest, it was sometimes a bit creepy how quiet the Swedish forests can be.
After doing a bit of research online the general recommendation was to go further north. (At the time we were somewhere around Stockholm) We headed up to the Höga Kusten and surprise surprise, I started seeing a few more birds, but the little fuckers are quick so the first set of shots were a blurry mess.
I did manage to capture some ducks silently floating by our camper on one of our overnight spots while we were cooking dinner. It seems to be a mother duck and it’s duck babies, although they seem pretty big already.
The funny thing about these ducks was the fact that a zoom was total overkill. It turned out that these ducks were extremely used to people so as soon as they got the chance they popped out of the water and came waddling at us.
So there I was looking like an absolute fool with the massive lens that wouldn’t even work properly since the minimum focus distance is about 2.4m.
We started seeing a lot more wildlife once we reached the Vildmarksvägen, a 360km road near the border with Norway going though forests, past lakes and over plateaus.
While hiking the Bjuralven we spotted these birds by accident. We found a bench near a stream where we had a little rest, which was welcome after doing about a million stairs.
After a few minutes we saw something moving in the tall grass not too far away. Luckily for me I had my priorities straight and before starting the hike, I ditched all food, water and other important stuff to be able to pack the massive zoom.
And boy, was I happy I had it with me.
This lens takes a little getting used to. The lens is heavy and shooting it handheld isn’t always easy and causes a lot of not-really-100%-in-focus-shots. There’s also weather and atmospheric conditions to account for but that wasn’t really an issue in this case.
That evening, while parked for the night next to a river we were greeted by several new types of birds we hadn't seen before: the Common Merganser, the Red-breasted Merganser and a little Wagtail.
Now, by far the coolest thing that happened was while parked next to yet another lake. While exploring the area around our camper we started hearing little squeaky sounds.
After emptying a few cans of WD40 on our camper we were still hearing the squeaky sounds, so we decided to continue our investigation.
Turns out, the squeaky sounds were coming from a huge nest located at the top of a tree on a small island a few hundred meters away from us.
We busted out the binoculars and bingo, there was an osprey in the nest feeding its little baby ospreys.
Getting a good photo proved to be tricky since the island was actually a bit too far. This photo is a cropped version of the original so the quality and sharpness aren't the best, but you can probably make out the osprey chilling in its nest.
These next photos give you a rough idea of how far it actually was in real life. The first photo was taken at 75mm so It really shows how close you can actually get with 900mm.
At the end of our trip we’d spotted ducks, birds, reindeer, squirrels, a fox’s tail as it scampered away in a bush, a hare, a snake, and even what I thought was a pallas cat (turns out, just a very fat Swedish house cat, and apparently pallas cats don’t even live in Sweden). Safe to say I was happy with the results.
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