This green heron was extremely shy, and the closest I could get was about 150 feet away, so it was cropped significantly. There was also some direct sunshine on the bird and the foliage, mucking up the color somewhat (shot as JPEG).

Taken with Panasonic G1 - handheld, with 45-200 lens at maximum zoom.

Dale, The only problem is see is that it's cropped so far it's actually pixelated. This probably is one of those "oh well..." times.

That's interesting - I didn't see pixellation on my 21" screen - here's a larger sharper copy - see what you think of that.

This is the first keepable-quality photo I've gotten of this type of bird, so I had two choices - crop to this point or buy everyone a magnifying glass. Actually, I could get a longer lens, but then I couldn't carry it. So many decisions.... BTW, I'm still waiting on a secret hi-res copy of the Altgens photo that shows once and for all whether it's Billy Lovelady standing in the Depository doorway, or you-know-who.

P.S. I think it's noise rather than pixellation. Maybe I should dump the Noise Ninja in favor of something else.

I think you're right. I downloaded a copy and looked at it CS4. If I expand it I can see pixelation, but at the size you have on the web the pixelation doesn't show up. The other problem is that with a compressed .jpeg it's hard to tell exactly what's going on. Good luck with finding this guy again and getting closer.

I just picked up a copy of Photography Monthly for the bargain price of $10.25 U.S., and reading through to a blurb on pro photog Jane Mingay, she uses the photo site Clikpic, which *requires* that images have a maximum width of 600 pixels, or 600 high in portrait mode. Now, how serious can anyone be if they're showing landscapes at 600 total pixels wide? Is that what people mean when they say "postage stamp art?" At 600 pixels wide, you might see a tree trunk here and there, but no leaves as such. If I absolutely had to post on a site like that, I'd prefer to *crop* out portions of a landscape, with instructions for re-pasting, than just shrink the whole thing.

I wouldn't post on a site like that under any circumstances. Here's another one: Audubon magazine has a bird photo contest going: http://audubonmagazinephotoawards.org/. Top prize is a trip to Peru. The catch is that in essence you turn over the copyrights to your pictures to them in perpetuity. I have a bunch of bird pictures like this one that are better than anything I've ever seen in their magazines or books but the idea that I'd just give away my copyrights is insane.

Click to view attachment

Seems like there's bound to be legal problems with agreements like that. My guess is they brazenly demand "total rights" just so they know they have at least the right to publish the images as is, "just in case." That's my guess, because there's no way a court in the U.S. would actually grant them absolute total rights forever unless there were an ironclad agreement signed by agents on both sides, with proper payment exchanged. I doubt that photo contest "rules and agreements" carry that kind of weight with the courts. All of which means you're at least in for some aggravation and inconvenience unless you just let them do whatever they want anyway.

That's a great photo of a hawk, but I prefer a dirtier, more grainy photo, since it seems to match the memory I have from most of my shoots, slogging through the wetlands and dusty, dry forest trails in the hot sun, trying to get a decent close-up of one of these birds.