The chuck is at about 75 yards and the hawk at about 275. I didn't range them though, but where we shot the photos I have shot before... a lot.
I think that once we get a remote shutter release things will improve significantly, but we just got the camera and Bridget and I are pretty enthusiastic about it so far. It was pretty warm in central WA this weekend and with the hawk I am thinking about how much mirage degrades resolution in our spotting scopes and we have a 100mm Unertl Team Scope and there are still none that have much on that old scope for resolving fine detail.
Funny thing about the chucks, their nose is soft in almost all the shots even though I can see individual hairs on their face and body. Once I get the hang of this blasted camera with so many settings I think that I can force shutter priority and beat that down. Me thinks the little rascals nose never stops twitching.
As I sit here typing this I have 15-20K invested in Nikon & Bronica film gear sitting within yards of me, including a 500mm Nikor for the Bronica & had a 300 2.8 ED-IF Nikor until some idiot stole it and this is a whole new experience for me to be able to reach out like this... and the damnable thing will take movies.
With my film cameras I couldn't crop and get the detailed resolution on a print I get with this $500 camera. Too much grain even with slide films.
I was setting up for digiscoping when I stumbled across this thing and to just take the camera out of the truck and snap it into a tripod instead of setting up one of our scopes with a camera made digiscoping really second best after I came across this setup.
Up til now my digital world has been small point and shoots. I really haven't kept up after Bridget was born and don't use my film gear at all any more. From what I have gathered, I am fairly safe from going all in in the digital world, in order to beat what I have in film gear with a digital setup I would make my investment in Bronica & Nikon film gear look like child's play before I even rounded first base. Other than auto-focus (which, by the way, is driving me nuts) and onboard metering, I don't see what I could possibly hope to gain w/a DSLR. But my fear is that once I get going on something I just want to see how far I can go.