he looks like he's watching for food. great picture and site!
Actually, I was sitting about 10 feet away from my six bird feeders looking for some nice bird shots and wondering why there were no birds around. A dove came in and parked at the top of a nearby tree. As i'm looking around the feeders I catch a big shadow moving around and turned in time to see that hawk attempting to nail the dove in mid air. The dove out maneuvered the hawk quickly and the hawk flew right over my head and landed on a branch back in the woods right in front of my line of site, but facing the other direction. I took around 150 shots of it and around 20 came out descent.
I just saw the first hummingbird of the season today. Hummingbirds are my primary target in the aviary world. I'm excited and ready with my new gear. That old Canon S1 IS, that I took over 8000 pics with over the last four years, just didn't do the job.
I'm not new to photography, but am new to SLRs (DSLR in my case) and all the flexibility that comes with it.
All these images are awesome and inspiring. Hopefully we can keep this thread going and i'll post some new pictures as I take them. I shoot every day.
I just got Photomatix, which, from what I read, is a good HDR application. You can take a RAW file, vary the exposure in software, and create good HDR with it. I don't know much about HDR, just read on it today. Expect me to exploit and experiment with it in the near future.
ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS shoot in RAW, if possible, and at the highest resolution you can. You never know when that one-in-a-million shot will happen, and it would suck to have it as a 800x600 JPEG.