The photographing ecologist got an update of his photographing gear, and that is amazing news! Most notoriously, I now got a 18-300 mm lens, a lens famously called a ‘holiday lens’, as it is perfectly suited for holiday trips where you do not want to take several lenses.

This holiday lens is the perfect allround lens, with an incredible range: it can both handle the wide angle ànd the close-up, all of that in just one twitch of the wheel.

While the critics say that you give in in quality if you want to have the whole range in one lens, this extreme flexibility is a blessing for a photographing ecologist (details of what that is, can be found here). As in my job, photography is only secondary. To let the work come first and still achieve breath-taking pictures that tell a story, speed and flexibility are key, and this 18-300 mm allows exactly that.

As the first trials show, the options are promising. Yes, the quality might not be as perfect as in the more expensive – less agile alternatives, but these minor details, the difference between very good and slightly better, do not weigh up to what the lens can do for me: allowing me to quickly jump from the closest to the furthest.