Koji Nakano | Markins Ring Plate

Koji Nakano

Born in 1972. Specializes in photographing wild birds and airplanes, and has published work mainly in magazines and advertisements. Travels around Japan and overseas in pursuit of two major themes: "Birdscape - Landscapes with birds" and "Jetscape - Landscapes with airplanes flying". Recent publications include "Techniques for Photographing Wild Birds with a Digital Camera" (Seibundo Shinkosha) and "Plane Photography Techniques with a Digital Camera" (AstroArts).

Member of the Japan Professional Photographers Society
URL : www.strix-photography.com

The difficulty of photographing wild birds varies greatly depending on the size, ecology, and habitat of the target species. For example, swans, ducks, and gulls that migrate in winter are often photographed from close range, so a relatively short focal length and bright lens can be used to capture them. Also, there is enough light during the day, so you won't have to worry about camera shake caused by shutter speed.

However, photographing mountain birds is much more difficult. First of all, the subjects are small, about 15 to 30 cm, and they are very wary, so there are very few opportunities to photograph them up close. Therefore, a large-aperture super telephoto lens such as a 600mm F4 or 800mm F5.6 is required. Although these lenses are in the "bright" category for super telephoto lenses, exposure is often difficult in dim forests. Of course, you can increase the ISO sensitivity to deal with this, but as long as the subject is still, you want to aim for higher quality photography by lowering the ISO sensitivity even if it means slowing down the shutter speed.

When photographing wild birds, there are two possible causes for blurring. One is "subject blur" caused by the subject moving during exposure, and the other is "camera blur" caused by the camera moving during exposure. The former can only be controlled by managing the shutter speed, but the latter can be reduced or prevented by improving the equipment and shooting method.

I currently use Nikon's AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR as my main lens, and I pay particular attention to preventing blurring in order to maximize the ultra-high image quality.

Although super telephoto lenses are long from front to back, in normal use, the only part that comes into contact with the pan head is the tripod mount, which makes it clearly unbalanced. This makes it impossible to suppress blurring. In addition, many genuine tripod mounts have a high center of gravity because they place too much emphasis on operability, which is not convenient in terms of preventing blurring and puts a lot of strain on the camera head. Therefore, effective measures to prevent blurring are to lower the center of gravity of the tripod mount and to increase the number of "supports" that hold the lens.

Markins Ring Plate RN-80SET is designed with these two points in mind. In addition to the lens foot having a lower center of gravity than the genuine one, the tip of the lens is fixed with a ring, so blurring caused by lens vibration is almost completely eliminated.

The effect of the ring plate is not limited to preventing blurring. Since the viewfinder image is very stable, it not only improves framing accuracy, but also improves focusing accuracy during AF/MF. It was also impressive that it was easy to grasp the timing to take action because you can see the detailed expressions of the bird in front of the viewfinder.

The RN-80SET is almost perfect for preventing lens shake, but the source of vibration is on the camera side, so you can achieve higher quality photography by supporting it with something like a monopod and eliminating mechanical shocks such as mirror lock, electronic front curtain, and fully electronic shutter.

In super telephoto photography, even the slightest shake can determine the success or failure of a photo. The RN-80SET ring plate is extremely effective not only for photographing wild birds living in dim forests and during twilight hours, but also for normal photography.