For Photographers

Sharp-Shinned Hawk through the new 70-200mm f/2.8 AF-S VR II

Well, make it three days in a row for our visitor and today he or she hung around for over two hours. For general information, the Sharp-Shinned looks very similar to a Cooper's Hawk, but is smaller, about the size of a dove and the fastest way to tell the two species from one another is the talons. The Sharp-Shinned Hawk has very narrow legs and this characteristic is the reason for the name.

A little information about how I was able to take this image. Shot this with a Nikon D3x with the new 70-200mm f/2.8 AF-S VR II Zoom-Nikkor mounted. My early impression of the lens is that it has phenomenal sharpness and when combined with the D3x, well magic can happen. I am including the finished shot and just below it is the original image.

I know that many of you Nikon shooters may be waiting for the new lens to become available and I thought some of you might appreciate a demonstration of just how incredibly sharp the new 70-200mm VR II really is. This image is cropped a little and I wanted to show you both so you can get an appreciation. The D3x deserves a fair amount of credit of course, the 24.5 MP sensor is very sweet. Any photographer knows that cameras and lenses are, in the end, just tools. However, in the right hands great tools can transform a less than ideal shooting situation into something much more manageable and give a shooter the opportunity to create great photographs that were perhaps destined to be average or poor.

By no means am I saying this is a great photograph, it is pretty pedestrian, truth be told, but I think this is a good demonstration of the capability of this really sweet glass and that is why I wanted to share it. I am still feeling the sting in my wallet, but lord almighty, what a lens. The really amazing thing about this shot is that I shot it through a garden window over our kitchen sink and the window was kind of dirty. A look at the original and it all becomes immediately apparent.

Here is the EXIF data: 1/500 sec @ f/9 - ISO 640 in Aperture Priority.

Sharp-Shinned Hawk

We've had a visitor the last two mornings on our deck, a Sharp-Shinned hawk. At first I thought this might be a juvenile Red-Shouldered Hawk, but a quick visit to Wildbirds Unlimited and a conversation with Yvonne cleared that up. These are small hawks, about half the size of a mature Red-Tailed hawk.

This shot was a very quick grab with a Nikon D3 and a Nikkor 200mm f/2 AF-S VR. It's a great lens, but I would have liked to have had my 200-400mm f/4 VR Nikkor with a 1.7x teleconverter for this one. Alas, was not to be and glad I was able to grab this one in burst mode before he or she flew off to continue his or her hunting.

The really amazing thing was that yesterday morning this guy or girl was sitting on the same feeder pole and a squirrel was eating some nuts from the rail of our deck just below it. It was a surreal scene on Thanksgiving with the hawk looking down on the squirrel and the squirrel apparently unaware of the hawk. Yvonne told me that small birds are the prey of these hawks and they don't eat squirrels, they're too big. Lucky squirrel, a Red-Tailed or Red-Shouldered Hawk, even a Cooper's Hawk, would have snatched the little squirrel right up.