The Falconer. A repost from my former gallery, because i really like the image and the subject myself. Inspiration for this render and composition... Came from browsing some photos i took in a eagle sanctuary, back in 1998. The portraying of a very special team. A falconer and her Bird of prey. A fantastic teamwork, which always fascinated me. It is an ancient art of hunting wild prey, with a trained predator. For the bird of prey, I selected the Peregrine Falcon(Daz Eagle2+texture expansion) The Perigrine falcon...is the fastest animal on earth, exceeding the 200MHP speed limit #:oD. A rather small bird. Only weighing about 2 pounds, with a Wingspan of 35-40 inches. When sky-diving during hunt... it exceeds 200MPH speeds. You need a Ferrari to follow it.#:o) It's wing shape is so amazing..that engineers sucessfully copied it... And in that way made jet fighter aircrafts go faster. So actually the military abuse the technology, from one of God's creations...#;oD...with the purpose of using the unique and brilliant wing anatomy. For evil causes.. war. #:o) The Falconer is a special personality too. It is a bit of a lifestyle to be a Falconer. A teamwork between a human, and a predator, based on mutual, trust, love, friendship, hard work, and training. Just a short description of how the Peregrine Falcon hunts: It sky-dive... and hit the target with it's chest-bone. It takes a very solid chest-bone, as you can imagine... but also precise 200MPH navigation. A collision with more than 200 MPH. That strike the target to the ground. The target is often killed, in the collission with the chest bone. Anyway.. Wikipedia.org has a lot of great information about this. I only saw the hunt for real a few times. Even if Denmark is a small country, with only approx. 6 million citizens. We have 2 Eagle sanctuaries. Run by a fantastic man named Frank Wenzel and his daughter. Frank Wenzel have worked with falconery for more than 30 years. If interested, you can read a bit about him on Click here to see www.eagleworld.dk Here is a lot of fantastic videos from one of the danish eagle sanctuarys. All videos are taped between 1970-2009. Here you can see on videos, how they train the largest eagles in the world: Click here to see www.eagleworld.dk video gallery. There is also an english version of his website. I visited both danish eagle sanctuaries a few times. And it was one of the most fantastic experiences i ever had. Seeing a Falconer and the Peregrine Falcon work for real, is highly recommendable. An experience you'll never forget. LMDesign - Elodie for V4 from LMDesign. A masterpiece in modeling and texturing. Richardphotos - Background picture - Wide Open Texas Skies- Fantastic photos shots from a master lens.