Canon 100-400mm or Canon 28-300mm for wildlife photography?

[compuwar]

All Generalizations are invariably wrong, somewhere (including this one!).

Um, no- "most" is accurate- there's more wildlife in non-dusty climates than in them and it does indeed depend on where you shoot.

When I was in Tanzania during the dry season in 2006, there was plenty of choking dust. It was most typically present whenever we passed another vehicle along a road, or were following another vehicle.

The exception proves the rule...

Its been years since I've done any photography in the American southwest, but I would expect conditions during the dry season to be generally similar.

The SW is usually not as dusty as the mid-west, but even there you'll generally find that outdoors it takes "something kicked it up and you still want to get the shot while it's not settled" to really affect a lens. I've never had issues in either place though.

 

[Edward Crim]

The web-compression on your pics don't do them justice...

Click on through to the other side (via the numbers and the blog) - on the main page I had to compress them a lot to keep the download time reasonable.

 

[joelypolly]

Depends on if you need anything below 100mm. You can always crop to get closer but you can "uncrop" to get more image so to speak.

Also the push/pull design is great for these super zooms as it much easier to use than a twist design do to the extremes of the zooms. As them them being a dust pump, it really spends on the camera you have and how well sealed it is. On my 30D it draws air from the battery compartment door and well if there is dust there then it would probably get sucked in. So keep your camera clean and you shouldn't have too many issues.