Thanks for your comments on my "Golden Eye." This photo is also sharp, clear, very vivid. I like the DOF and the brownish background for this predominately brown hawk. The overall effect is striking. I also like the catchlight in this hawks eye. Did you use a flash?
James, thanks for your comments on my Hawk and Mockingbird, but THIS shot is awesome! I guess with your DR, you get 480mm equivalent, or do you also use an extender? My camera, per your question, is a Panasonic DMC-FZ1, upgraded recently (firmware) to FZ2, to give it shutter priority, aperture priority, and a few other new features too numerous to mention. It has a "12X" zoom lens, enabling an equivalent zoom range of 35 to 420 mm in a Leica lens which has a maximum aperture of f2.8 over its entire range. And, it has an image stabilizer, letting me take handheld full telephoto shots down to as low as 1/25 of a second. My camera has 2MP, which I find perfectly adequate for most things, but Panasonic has recently introduced a scaled-up camera having even more features than mine at 4MP, the DMC-FZ10. Pricewise, the FZ1/FZ10 are selling at around $300/$500, respectively these days. They're both pretty good bargains, considering what you'd have to pay for a stabilized f2.8 35-420mm Leica lens alone, if you could even get such a thing!
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