Nice crown... again aberration in the background. This can be corrected, just have to google for "photoshop correct aberration". It is not hard to do. I will be fixing these up after I backup the orginals. 

nice side shot of her 

Female with an interesting breast.. cough yes I did just say that 

Cardinals fighting 

aberration on the edge of the snow... I don't know if you will be able to see it... but I still like the sparrows wings 

I picked up a backup camera not too long ago. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20 was my choice for for a couple reasons. Long lens (35-432mm), fast lens (f2.8 all the way through), with a nice sized sensor (5mp) at a very nice price ($600). Another one of the reasons that I picked it up was that to rent a 400mm f2.8 VR lens along with a smaller lens for a planned trip to Iceland I was close in price to just buying this camera. I know the lens quality will not be the same but now I have a back up if need be AND I have a zoom f2.8 with VR!

The camera feels like it is made of plastic. It is sort of light and the hand grip is just not quite big enough. It boots up quickly, but does have a little bit of a shutter lag. Overall it has been easy to operate.

The focus ring has a very nice feel to it, but what I really like is when you are manually focusing it brings the center of the screen to full resolution so you can see if the image is actually focused or not. The AF system is not as nice as the D70s (gee who would have guessed) and I have several times found myself flipping it to MF. Not as bad as it could but because of the nice MF system, but still an annoyance.

The ability to create movies is great! The camera can use its image stabilization while shooting and it even records sound. Alas there is not an ability to zoom while taking movies, this would be very nice.

The flash is awesome. I have been shooting from across a large room in my house and have been able to light things up as bright as day. I am not sure about the red eye properties.

The USB transfer cord is non-standard. Why did they do this? I am not sure but is sure is a shitty thing to do to such a nice camera.

It uses SD memory cards, which is fine I guess, but I already have a nice investment in CF cards which I can get microdrives for. Boo. Oh ya and the 16MB card that comes with it is a waste. Go out and get a 512MB, or a 1GB if you are not going to have a laptop along.

When deleting images one can erase all images which is nice, but also dangerous.

The view finder is… odd. It appears to actually be a mini LCD screen in there. Odd, but works OK. I find myself putting the camera up to my eye every once in a while and it works out fine.

Live histogram. Oh baby what a great feature. I wish the D70 had this feature. Digital is great for a lot of reasons, but the ability to immediately see how the image was exposed it one of the greatest. Being able to do it in real-time is even better.

On to that huge piece of Leica glass. 35-432mm f2.8 with Image Stabilization. Oh yes this is what I have wanted for my DSLR for a long time now and have never seen. The zoom is quick from end to end and it can focus very close at wide angle (see pictures above). There is one complaint about the lens. Chromatic aberration. Yes I have not had the camera long and have seen it. It is not as bad as my 600-1300mm Phoenix but it is still there and noticeable. This can be fixed with in photoshop with not much effort, but it is another step that needs to be taken.

Overall I am very happy with the camera. It is a good piece of equipment at a fair price.
 

Macro shot 

Moon with a halo. The halo went away before I could get the little bit on the right, so I took some more images of the nice orange clouds. And yes I think that is about the only time that I will enjoy the light polution 

Poor bird lost an eye 

St. Paul Raptor Centor on the St. Paul campus 

And this is what happens when taking pictures of stars at ~ 2000mm with a tripod which is too small. I do still like it. 

There is some chromatic abberation, but overall fairly nice... I really do like the 650-1300mm mounted on a 1.5x crop DSLR 

Cone flower. The Gold Finchs love these 

You can see the where the birds wing hit the snow 

Panoramic 

Little red owl at the St. Paul Raptor Center 

My parents got me these things called Yak Tracks. They are a rubber slip over for your boots when walking on snow/ice. They have wire wrapped around part of rubber webbing. I wore my pair up to the North Shore of Lake Superior this December. Snow and ice is everywhere, with the location of the ice not always being very obvious. I noticed several times that the Yak Tracks saved me from slipping. Great stuff, no more broken equipment, no more broken me!
 

Long lens - I wanted to get something longer then my current 28-200mm. I ended up finding the Phoenix 650-1300mm f8-f16. It was ~$300 from bhphotovideo.com (great people, good prices, I will be purchasing some pro lenses from them). The UV filter was another ~$80! I have had it for around a month now and have had an opportunity to work with it a good deal. Overall I like it, but it does have many problems, about what one expects from a cheap lens.
Note I am using a 1.5x crop factor sensor so the lens is more of a 975-1950mm f8-f16
-A large tripod is needed. The lens weight 4.4 lbs so a small tripod will not cut it. When dealing with a lens that is that long (really more of a small telescope) you are going to notice every little shake, unless it is absolutely still.
-Those slow f stops are amazingly slow. The light gathering ability is very poor which hurts how much you can cut down the shutter speed.
-Chromatic aberration is noticeable. Yes this really does harsh things to your final image, but you really are getting what you pay for.
-I have always used auto focus lenses this manual focus thing is new to me. It is tough because the image in the viewfinder is dark (because the lens does not send much light through)
-Focus OK I should have known this from when I took optics in physics, but when they say a focus distance of 16 feet they mean 16 feet at 1300mm. I am not sure what it is at 650mm but it is a good deal further out (30+ feet)

With the combination of trying to minimize the shutter speed and the slow f-stop one ends up with a lot of dark images. Photoshop CS shadow/highlight can help you a little bit here, but the images are still dark.

OK so that was the bad. The good is: look at some of the below images. The ones of the deer are all taken from 50-70 feet away, with none of the images being trimmed or blown up. The lens was not even at 1300mm! The Owl was a LONG ways away and I was able to fill the frame head to tail. I even hand held the lens while photographing the owl. But the lens is long and heavy. Left arm all the way extended to keep my hand on the focus and most of the weight is at that end. One needs to be fairly strong to be able to hand hold this lens.

Like I said, overall I like it but there are many problems. It has enabled me to get images that there is no other way that I could (ya sure you sneak up on the deer in crunchy snow).
 

Photoshop CS Shadow/Highlight to pull detail out of snow
Turn the highlight slider up around 20% and a good deal of detail will be shown in the snow. This only works if you have not blown the range in the snow. I have had some really good luck with this.
 

 

 

 

 

 

8 point buck