Photographs by Steve Wolfe
I'm a relative newcomer to birds and bird photography, but I vividly remember the incident that sparked what has since become, well, an obsession. In July 2004, while backpacking in northeast Nevada's Jarbidge Wilderness, I was dive-bombed on 3 separate occasions by Northern Goshawks who, as I discovered later, were probably defending their nests. I was fortunate to be carrying a Panasonic Lumix FZ10 image-stabilized digicam with a Leica 35-420mm lens that successfully captured one of the attacks, and with that my fascination with birds began.
In April 2005 I used my next camera, a Panasonic FZ20, to chronicle the raising and fledging of 3 Red-tail "hawklets" in a nest on a building ledge at the hospital in suburban Los Angeles where I work. Later that year I attached a Red-Dot Sight to my new camera, the FZ30--upgrading can become addictive--and captured birds-in-flight with the new setup. I wrote an article about this inexpensive way to capture "BIFs" for the Cornell Lab website and in November 2006 I finally bought my first DSLR, a weather-sealed, image-stabilization-in-camera Pentax K10D. My favorite lens for bird photography is the Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm f4-6.3 AF, and it was with the K10D/Bigma combination that I had the rare good fortune to discover and photograph a first summer Mississippi Kite in May 2007, only the 6th recorded time that species of Kite has been seen in California's Los Angeles County.
So I can honestly say that digital photography and image-stabilized cameras opened a world of wonder and excitement previously unknown to me, and I know it's a passion I will enjoy for years to come.
Visit Steve's web site to enjoy more of his images.