When was the last time you did a wildlife shot and never looked at the eye to see if it was in focus without going to 100 or even 200%?

I think the best recommendation would be to speak with the leader of the trip. They will know what lens is best. I have spoken with several people who went on this trip. They all said a fast 24-70 is all you need. Guides carry your gear for you, so that is not an issue You will be shooting in very dim light, so fast lenses are more important than anything else. Again, check with the tour leader.

Suggest the Wild Animal Park in Escondido (northern San Diego county) and Balboa Park.

Nice images. How was the quality of the 800 vs. the 100-500 when carefully examined at 100%?

If you’re going to East Africa, Kenya and/or Tanzania lens length is king. Minimum necessary is 500mm, by whatever means, ie., cropped sensor, tele-converter, zoom or prime lens. Pick a photo safari only. One in which you have a row for each photographer and can move side to side. More expensive but well worth it. Other countries where you don’t have the wide open savanna you might be able to get by with 400 (maybe).
Picking the right season is also important- check out some of links listed above for more info. Due to COVID I’ve had to postpone my trip twice and pray next year will be the charm.
Paul Renner safari is the one I’ve used twice. Trip of a lifetime. Good Luck 👍

Go to Alaska for eagles. They’re like pigeons up there. Check out RobertOtoole.com I’ve done two trips and had trouble editing the several hundred “wall hangers” after each one. 😎

Billboards are printed I believe about 8-10 dpi because at hundreds of feet away everything merges together. Compare that to a 20-30 inch print seen at less than 10 feet.

FYI - the Canon mirrorless system uses a different mount- (mount much wider) which is part of the reason Canon switched to it. It all depends on what kind of photography you do and more importantly what are you going to do with your images. If you are going to upload to the web anything will work. Just look at the model images vs. the downloaded ones - huge difference. Are you going to use your images commercially? or make LARGE prints? Then you need large files? I shoot sports and wildlife as well as nature and landscape. I have ordered the Canon R5 because of a number of reasons- large files(so I can crop my birds and sports images). In body stabilization coupled with lens stabilization so I can shoot in low light without having to shoot ISO 6400; high frame rates, etc. And finally some unique lenses not available with their DSLR. I will continue to use my regular lenses and gradually switch over. One final point- Nikon is a very small company compared to Sony and Canon. They have made, I believe a bad decision to continue both their DSLR and the mirrorless line. They don’t appear to have the resources to do what is necessary. I would recommend buying a Nikon 850. It is by far the best DSLR I have ever seen; no one else comes close. Buy the best glass you can afford and IMHO within a year or two you will find prices coming down precipitously. Good luck.

For Mac users, I would strongly recommend SuperDuper for copying images to another external hard drive. Great program with free updates. I use Back Blaze for a backup in the cloud. Will back up both internal and external drives with no cap on size.

Used scan cafe for about 4500 Kodachrome (which doesn’t fade-in my experience). Unloaded about 55 Carousels (89 and 140) after projecting them to pick out the ones I didn’t want to scan. Boxed them up with 2x2 pieces of cardboard between groups. Got highest resolution 4000dpi and had them scanned to a hard drive.
Come on David of Dallas- shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. I still have an Ektachrome projector so if you want to come down to Georgetown you could go thru them pretty quickly😎

Nice try but unfortunately the bird , especially the eye,are not sharp.