The New Hotness

Heard two Cooper’s Hawks doing a call-and-response exchange a few mornings ago, with the nearest bird in a tall pine in the back yard. I’m surprised that a one-pound bird can perch on the very tippy-top branch of a pine without bending it over, but they seem to do this quite often.

The picture is a crop from the full frame, taken with a Sony DSC-H5 at full optical zoom with a VCL-HGD1758 1.7x Tele Conversion Lens. There’s plenty of violet fringing in evidence, which is one reason I try not to take high-contrast backlit shots like this.

Here’s a dot-for-dot crop of just the bird to show how bad the fringing really is.

It’s better than no picture at all, the way I see it…