I’ve been fortunate enough to temporarily rent a luxury telephoto prime that welcomed pixel-peeping while melting backgrounds into oblivion – but the lens cost more than my first two cars combined and felt like carrying around a third leg.
When Sony announced that it had turned two luxury lenses into portable and semi-affordable lenses with the 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/5.6 GM OSS lenses, I knew I had to take a hike at one of my favorite spots for wildlife photography – a nearby wildlife refuge.
Hiking with the new Sony 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/5.6 felt more like carrying around two 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses rather than two extreme reach telephoto primes. The lenses slide in at just under a kilogram and just over two pounds. That certainly added a little weight to my hands and my backpack, but that’s about three times lighter than Sony’s brighter 400mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4.
I started out with the 400mm, but immediately spotted a bird that I couldn’t recognize and quietly swapped it out for the 600mm for a closer look. I watched the little fellow sit on a branch and peer into the water for prey for several minutes.
I used the 600mm on the Sony A7 V, not one of the highest-resolution full-frame bodies, but the 600mm lens was still impressively sharp and detailed. Cropping in on my shots, I realized that I had a hard time identifying the bird because it was a juvenile black-crowned night heron with an entirely different feather pattern from the adults.
I was able to photograph several more birds with the Sony 600mm f/5.6 GM OSS. The lens doesn’t melt the background quite like an f/4, and I had to use a slightly higher ISO. But the trade-off is that the lens is still very much hike-friendly rather than sitting and waiting inside a wildlife blind.
The biggest surprise from my shoot with the two new Sony telephotos, however, came after I returned home and blew up the photos on my screen. I had captured this very distant egret, knowing he would be very small in the frame, but liking how his features were backlit anyway.
But when I looked at the photo on my screen, I realized that the same branch also held a perfectly preserved spider web. Even cropping in from the 33MP, there’s still an impressive level of detail in that spider web.
I tend to crave more reach when out photographing wildlife, so I was also surprised when I actually ended up with more photos that I marked from the 400mm f/4.5. With a bit less reach, the 400mm has that brighter aperture and is still very lightweight.
As I made my way back to my car, I had to watch my step as dozens of frogs leapt out of the path. Just before the parking lot, I watched this egret fish, which, with the f/4.5 aperture on the 400mm, I was still able to freeze the water droplets at 1/5,000 and ISO 400.
The launch of the new Sony 400mm and 600mm brings a sort of happy medium to the E-Mount telephoto family. Sony has luxury wildlife lenses like the 600mm f/4 and cheap optics like the Sony 100-400mm f/5.6-8 OSS. The new Sony 400mm f/4.5 and 600mm f/5.6 GM OSS slot in as a Goldilocks, just-right balance between price, weight, and image quality.
Sony FE 400mm f/4.5 GM OSS
Sony FE 600mm f/5.6 GM OSS
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