learn me telephoto lens

i am told a 300mm lens is the longest i can use handheld is that true, i have the 300mm nikor with the antivibrate and it works pretty good but is there anything longer i could get for wildlife??

I've never tried anything over 300mm myself. What's the next step up, 500mm? I'd be hard pressed to do a decent job without at least a monopod.

300 is pretty darn long for handheld, I'd say. Its not impossible, but one of those ...if a 3 legged thing is a tripod, would a single leg thing be a monopod? A unipod? Whatever- You see the sports photographers all the time with a spike screwed to the bottom of their camera.

Yea 500mm is either going to be outrageously expensive or really cheap (quality). Sigma makes a 300-500mm that I guess is ok. I've seen some mirror 500+mm lens on Amazon for only $150 and they take half decent shots. I think Rokinon makes a 650-2600mm lens kit for $275.

I've often wished I had a cheap super long lens for taking bird shots just to say "I got a shot of a Bald Eagle" on facebook.

yeah, thats just it my wife loves birds and we have seen many bald eagles in the last year and you can use the 300 and then zoom or blow it up a tad but it is not ideal...i guess i could just bump up the body from the nikon 5000 to the 5700 and double the pixels...no that would not work, blurry is blurry no matter the number of pixels..and a tri or monopod....i dont know how you move the frame around quick enough to frame a moving object......oh well thanks for the input.

The faster the shutter speed the more you can hand-hold. If you're shooting in bright daylight you'll be able to get away with more.

Also remember that any given focal length is expressed in 35mm equivalent, meaning that with a crop sensor you get a greater effective FL. Obviously, there's a fine line between image quality and focal length, but in some cases a crop sensor is your friend.

I recently got my wife a 100-400 Canon lens with image stabilization. With the stabilization it can be hand held but it's still handful and not exactly cheap. Had to spend a lot of time with a knowledgeable friend to be able to select stuff for her. I know diddly about cameras, or I used to know diddly, I got a crash course over the last year.

As Keith noted too light is your friend. The lens I got the wife is lousy in low light situations but great for outdoor full light use.

Next step up in Nikor lenses would be either a 400 or 500, but you are talking 4 challenge car prices there. I have used a borrowed Canon 500 on a custom made gun stock type mount and also on a monopod and I prefer the monopod. Most serious wildlife photographers use a 500.

I don't have a DLSR but my SX10IS will zoom out to 560 (35mm equivalent) and I use all of that for wildlife photography.

Have you considered a teleconverter?

i just discovered the teleconverter on ebay the nikon 2x is 500 bucks but i am told my lens is not fast enough, so i am still studying it.

I had a 75-300 cheapo lens in my pentax days... the body had image stabilization... if I bumped the IS switch things got pretty bad... but that was also on a crop sensor body so we're talking nearly 500mm on a 35mm format... it was fairly usable even indoors as log as I didn't go too insane on the long end, outside in good light I could get away with a lot more... but it was certainly a slow lens

I also had a crappy/cheap 500mm that was crap... would have been better off tossing it in the trash.

these days I shoot canon and the longest I use is a 70-200 2.8 non IS... on a full frame 5d mkII (this is events and such... borrowed gear) even in poor light I can shoot fairly comfortably, just have to boost the ISO a bit... my 60d can do a decent job but takes a little more work to steady at the long end... can't boost the ISO as much on the crop sensor without a significant noise gain :(

in short my take would be don't bother going over 300, ideally go with the camera brand you shoot and don't even consider it without VC/IS

as for teleconverters... remember that you loose a stop or more of light depending on its power and may or may not be comparable, if it's a lower end consumer lens it may even render the auto-focus useless :-/

I wasn't sure what kind of glass was available for Nikon, so I ran through keh.com, and wasn't very impressed with what I saw. And nothing longer that 300mm. Something like this, for a grand, might be worth a look;

http://www.amazon.com/Tamron-200-500mm-5-0-6-3-Digital-Cameras/dp/B00021EE7W/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_1_1

That said, I would definitely rent a lens that I was interested in before buying. Get an idea of what you want, find a place that will rent it, and really give it a run before buying. Good way to find out if it is really what you want or not.

Don't discount your computers ability to edit the image and create a zoom that way. Save the images in high resolution, then zoom and crop on the computer. It works well, within limits. Especially if you want snap-shot sized pictures. Wall hangers are a bit more of a problem.

I will sometimes use a monopod when shooting racecars with my 200.. I wouldn't even attempt to try to freehand anything bigger than 300 without direct sunlight. It always takes me a few seconds to get back into the swing of things when I mount up the monopod, but after a minute, it's completely natural to use.

I shoot with a Sigma 120-400.

Great lens, and yes you'll need a monopod.

I'll just leave this here.