A Tale of Two Zooms

My new camera arrived today. (Yay!) Now, people can tell me, "My, what a big camera you have." I can tell I'll be getting stronger neck muscles, just carrying it around with the neck strap.

It will definitely take quite a while for me to learn all the options, but one thing I was interested in was the 12x optical zoom. Here are the first two photos I took with it (shrunken by Hello), which amounted to a zoom test. Both are out my back door, with everything on "automatic" mode, and are of the neighbour kids playing football.

The first one is a tough shot, as the camera has a lot of choices regarding what to focus on:


And here is a shot with everything still on "Auto", but zoomed in all the way:

Cool? Yep.
The neatest thing you ever saw in your life? Probably not.