Over summer I had the excellent job of shooting with the in-development Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 PF S. My brief was birds, and I had a great time putting the lens through its paces, mounted on the new Nikon Z9. As a preface, for those who aren’t familiar with my normal work – I shoot predominantly with a Nikon D500, 80-400mm or 300mm f4. An 800mm lens took me out of my comfort zone, but proved surprisingly addictive to shoot with! I also trialled the two teleconverters 1.4x and 2x, which added yet more reach with minimal loss of quality. This blog is about my impressions of using the lens, mostly for bird photography. 

I was apprehensive about being able to hand-hold this lens, when it was described to me. I envisaged using at least a monopod, probably a tripod for the work. In the end though, I shot everything handheld. The Nikkor Z 800mm is light, to an almost surprising extent. I’m a small person, and not the strongest, but I am used to flinging around a 200-400mm f4 (usually handheld, sometimes with a monopod), which weighs in at about 4kg. At a mere 2.3 kg, the Nikkor Z 800mm surprised me every time I lifted it up. It was comfortable to use for hours at a stretch, panning with flying birds (although it did get heavier and heavier as the day wore on!). I often spend entire afternoons (up to 6 hours) with the tākapu/Australasian gannets at Muriwai, and this lens was comfortable to use for the duration. It has a great lens foot which is well positioned and nicely padded, which also makes it comfortable to carry around. 

Weight aside, it’s still a decent size lens. Panning with flying birds gets tricky in the wind, but apart from seriously blustery conditions I had no problems using it. I really threw everything at the lens too – a great test of tracking birds in flight was trying to photograph fast-flitting warou/welcome swallows. These birds are tricky at the best of times. It wasn’t easy, but it also wasn’t impossible, and I think the results speak for themselves! I was quite elated with these images. The Z9’s autofocus modes also played a role here – my favourite after testing them all is the wide-area AF with animal eye detection on. It’s very very good. For more complex backgrounds and more static subjects, I have the single centre point on the multiselector for precision focusing. 

Something in the lens I turned off nearly immediately was the aperture ring. I work in a very mobile way, and as I was carrying the lens around I was bumping the aperture ring without noticing it, and then wondering why I’d jumped from f/6.3 to f/8. I think if I worked on a tripod I might use this feature more, but as it is I shoot full manual and use the front wheel to control aperture on the camera body anyway, making the lens ring superfluous. 

Shooting at 800mm, and then again with the teleconverters at 1250mm (1.4x) and 1600mm (2x) forced me to think creatively about my usual approach to bird photography, now with a much constrained field of vision. I love the reach, which enabled me to easily get photographs of wary birds like waders which are often hard to get close enough to! I love this aspect of a long telephoto – anything that minimises bird stress is a huge plus in my book. 

The sharpness of the lens is addictive, and there is very little deterioration with the 1.4x. The 2x proved harder to shoot with in hot summery conditions, where heat haze was my constant enemy. However, it did still produce some beautifully sharp images, and if you need the reach, it’s a great addition. The autofocus works fine with both the teleconverters, with no loss of speed or accuracy. The photography nerd side of me would recommend calibrating each lens/teleconverters combination with the camera body – I found this helped the reliability of results with the teleconverters. My copy of the lens itself didn’t need any AF fine tuning at all.

My ultimate test for a bird lens is shooting seabirds at sea. Erratic little storm petrels are the ultimate challenge of manoeuvrability for a lens! So to sea we went, and the Z800mm passed with flying colours. I wouldn’t think to use an 800mm lens for seabird photography normally, as it’s not often necessary to have that much reach, but it was quite nice getting really frame-filling images without the need to crop at all. These beautiful takahikare-moana/white-faced storm petrels really put on a show for me! 

Shooting at slow shutter speeds pushed my panning technique to its limit! Panning to get a sharp bird and a blurred background is really, really difficult to do reliably, especially with long telephoto lenses. The image stabilisation does work wonders with this lens though, and I could reliably hold slow shutter speeds in low-light conditions, and get sharp panning shots. Even just static shots at slow shutter speeds came out really well.

An aside and a testament to this lens and the vibration reduction technology was shooting the moon handheld with the 2x teleconverter. Ridiculous quality.

Hands down, I loved using this lens. 800mm is a fantastic reach for wildlife photography, particularly bird photography. The lens is easy to hand-hold and produces beautifully crisp images. It’s not cheap, but I can definitely see myself loaning one for specific jobs in future – particularly shooting shy birds that are difficult to get close to, to minimise my impact on them.

I also fell deeply in love with the Z9…now there’s a camera that needs to make its way into my bag! Apart from the autofocus technology, and the continuous view through the electronic viewfinder, my main joy was shooting completely silently – another way to minimise disturbance to wildlife. DSLRs are loud, and I really noticed the shutter noise going back to my D500! Here’s some more sample photographs:

These are just my impressions after a month and a bit of shooting with this lens every day, in all sorts of conditions. If you want to talk technical or have any questions, drop a comment below!