Chickadees flitting about the woods in winter. People feed them, so they are pretty tame. I got very close to them and was able to fill the frame using my Nikon 70-210 f4 and Tamron 1.4x teleconverter for an effective 441mm focal length. Since I was hand holding, I shot at 800ISO to get a good shutter speed.

On a second trip to the woods, I took my Tamron 180mm macro lense, which can focus much closer. With the Tamron 1.4x, the focal length is again very strong, but with the ability to get closer to these tame birds, I could fill the frame even better. The result is some stunning detail on the chest feathers.

My third Chickadee expedition cam in Jan of 2008 ... a beautiful sunny morning, but very frigid. A young woman was feeding them on the trail and they would flit in and out in about a second. Using my 300 F4 AFS with TC17e teleconverter, I was able to shoot quite close at 510mm (730mm after crop), which enabled some very fine detail on the birds. On the other hand, the field of view was so narrow, that it was difficult to keep up with the birds, so I got a limited set of images ... none in the trees as I had before. This makes a big differnence and would probably be the number 1 reason to shoot the 80-400VR for small tame birds. Of course, a monopod would also have been more responsive. Maybe next time. The other big difference here was the use of flash to add a catch light in their eyes, this worked very well.