We are back from our travels for the moment, having been, in the past two weeks, in both the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and New Mexico (Harlingen and Bosque del Apache near Socorro). I have large back-log of scenics and bird shots to post over the next while, so brace yourselves 🙂

This is an immature Red-Shouldered Hawk that apparently thought the few leaves between us hid him from view…as he was sitting no more than 30 feet from the main access trail at Santa Anna National Wildlife Refuge where at least our whole bus-load of birders got to admire him. This shot was taken with a Canon SD100HS point and shoot camera through the eyepiece of a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. You can see the out of focus foliage in front of the bird, but, though I could find no clear line of sight, the highly selective focus on the spotting scope made focusing through the foliage possible. It was also a matter of timing as the brisk breeze was moving the leaves so that the head and eye of the bird were only sometimes clear and well lighted. I was shooting bursts of 4 frames per second shots and selected the best for final processing.

Canon SD100HS behind the eyepiece of the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL for the equivalent field of view of something like a 1200mm lens on a full frame DSLR. 1/100th @ ISO 100. f4 effective.

Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.

And another with the zoom on the camera run up to max at 4x.

And, just for fun, a comparison shot from the Canon SX40HS at full optical plus 2x digital tel-converter for an 1680mm equivalent field of view.