dogzilla

I finally found some eagles today. These are a few of the pictures I got.

Tech

the composition is wonderful but the color palette is kinda dull... maybe a little saturation? i don't know if it'd do anything. 3 and 7 are my favorites.

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jaded

love to see them fly. they belong to the sky. my favorites are #7 and #12.

degrawj

holy crap man!!! those are some beautiful pictures! i don't know if you've already answered this in another thread, but what is your setup?

powerclown

Very nice indeed.
I like the shot where the eagle is staring right at the camera.

Thanks for sharing these.

inharmony

Those are great shots. I like the flying pics as well, but really like the 3rd pic.

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Boo Radley

Gotta Love Eagles,they are all very majestic. Tthere are a couple of bald Eagles that live down on a river that i cross every day.. it's always a treat to see them. Thank you for sharing.
Favorite is #8, great focus and clarity on that one.

Shpoop

oh man some fascinating ones there...bet that was wonderful to watch first hand

tropicdiver

David, I think they are pretty darn good shots. One only has to try to capture a bird in flight to know the difficulties involved in that, not to mention that eagles are rather skittish and don't sit still for anyone walking up to them. And of course, what a thrill it is capturing two in the same photo, also.

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dogzilla

Thanks for all the comments. This was an enjoyable day watching about a half dozen eagles flying around. I was a bit worried about seeing any because it has been so cold around here and most rivers have frozen over. Yesterday also started out very cold and then warmed up nicely.

My brother and I were able to get fairly close to a couple of eagles. We were close to the base of the tree where the eagle was perched when I got that shot and were maybe 50 feet freom a couple eagles standing on the ice.

I tweaked the colors a bit in photoshop since the images out of the camera were a bit flatter. I hesitate to change too much in photoshop since I end up with pictures that look very contrasty and fake. Other than the birds, there's almost no color around here in winter, so a lot of my winter pictures end up as almost black & white with little spots of color.

My setup is a Digital Rebel with a 70-200 F2.8L zoom lens and a 2x extender for the lens. Most of the time I was shooting at the far end of the zoom range, which, with the 1.6x crop factor in the camera gives me effectively a 640mm F5.6 lens.

I shot most of these handheld, trying to keep the aperture around F8.0 or so and shutter speed 1/1000 second or faster. So, with a bright sunny day I was shooting at ISO 200 or ISO 400.

I'm really happy with the camera and lens even though the camera is the low end of the SLR range. Two somewhat frustrating limits are the lack of servo mode autofocus and the small image buffer. The lack of servo mode means the camera will not automatically refocus as I track a flying bird. I've sort of gotten around this by repeatedly tapping the shutter to trigger autofocus as I track the bird. I have to be sure the focus point is on the bird or I end up focusing on trees and get a blurry picture. The buffer limit means I can only click three images then have to wait 5-10 seconds before I can shoot more. I ended up missing what I thought were a few good shots. Unfortunately, the only solution to that is a more expensive camera.

Hope I haven't bored anybody with the tech stuff.

Frowning Budah

You seem to have a real affinity for your subject. I agree with Tech though, the color could use some punch, but I suspect your subject kind of limits your options. Great shots just the same.

LewisCouch

Great shots of an amazing bird. We've got a few of them around here, however, I can never get as close to them as I'd like. Are you happy with the 2.0 extender you're using? I'm using the 1.4 and I'm not entirely pleased with the focus.

Keep up the great posts!

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flstf

Great pictures. I especially like the third one, he seems so smug surveying his domain.

dogzilla

Up until yesterday, I wasn't that happy with the extender and focus sharpness. I even took a few pictures without the extender figuring I could crop and enlarge in photoshop and get something better than I could get with the extender.

However, I printed 8.5x11 images that are pretty close to the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 12th images posted here. These are crops of about 1/4 of the original image area. The birds in the printed images look razor sharp to me.

I think the key is to stop down the aperture, since yesterday I made it a point to shoot in the F8-F9 range even though it meant shooting at iso 200-400 to keep the shutter speed in the 1/600-1/1000 second range. Previously I was shooting closer to F5.6 to keet the shutter speed up.

What I have read is that the 1.4x extender is better rated than the 2x extender.

LewisCouch

Thanks for responding, and good observation. I too have played around with stepping down the aperture and fast shutter speeds, and just haven't been all that pleased with the results. I've read that it's best to use a tripod when shooting with an extender, so I'm going to try that sometime. Kinda hard to do with majestic specimens that are camera shy, though.

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"The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk."

-- Massimo d'Azeglio