I’ve been going through my thousands of photos taken this past year and finding those I haven’t edited or posted yet. This was a great day photographing some bald eagles on the Sterling Highway.
It was also very frustrating as well. Since it was snowing so hard and the flakes were large my camera had trouble focusing on the eagles and not the falling snow. I would see the eagle clearly through the viewfinder and then look at the shot and it would be slightly blurry. I was using my 500mm f/4 prime lens for these shots handheld. This is a heavy combo to handhold for a long time 🙂
After a few shots I added my 1.4x teleconverter for a focal length of 700mm. I was trying to find a way to get more consistent focusing. I decreased the aperture to f/ 8.0 to also try and increase the depth of focus to capture the eagle in focus even if the camera focused in front a little, This improved the depth of field, but also made auto focus slightly more difficult through the smaller aperture,
I was really hoping this guy was going to take off, but he was just getting the snow off his feathers. I actually have no idea if this is a male or a female. I was also shooting in manual mode so I could control the shutter and the aperture for the look I was going for in the dim light. I usually shoot most of the time in Aperture mode, controlling the depth of field and letting the shutter compensate. The shutter was going to slowly in aperture mode due to trying to get the exposure correct.
A different eagle flew to a near by tree that I could get closer to. I should have taken off the teleconverter, but in the moment I just wasn’t thinking about the field of view. The snow had also lightened making focus acquisition easier.
Focusing on getting the eye in focus I didn’t realize I was cutting off the tail feathers. On the plus side because there isn’t much cropping, if someone wanted a huge photo of this eagle you could get a 48″ plus image with 300dpi :).
The key to getting wildlife photographs is returning to a location where the wildlife has been known to be located over and over again. Getting great wildlife photographs, and landscape for that matter, are most of the time the “luck” of being there the one time the wildlife shows up or the lighting is perfect. Photographers know this isn’t luck at all, but rather staying in a spot sometimes for hours on end, and returning frequently. I’ve been down this road weekly for the past year and only seen eagles in these trees a handful of times.
