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This was actually taken December 31st while eagle "hunting"(camera, obviously) in Iowa at Desoto Bend. It was some rather sick looking iridescence on the cirrus cloud passing by. Looks like someone spilt oil on the clouds.
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I was about blinding myself trying to take these at 400mm. I was panning the camera around, like where the hell did it go, oh hello there's the sun.
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Here I was again trying my hardest to blind myself, pointing a 400mm view towards the sun. I was walking down the river, looking for the eagles, when I about spooked this one off while not paying attention. He let me sneak up quite a ways. The sun was starting to glare in on my shot when I noticed, hey I could probably keep moving and silhouette him directly in front of the sun. While doing it I thought, this is really a dumb idea....but continued. I had to look through the lens at an angle, just enough so that I could tell when it was right behind him. If I looked straight through, well I'd just really regret it(a bit like using a telescope to look at the sun). It wasn't helping the shot that he was moving, and I about to take off....and I was also on AV with the metering point in the center(and no time to go to manual and change settings). I thought, I'm going to do this and it's going to completely blow out if my metering point is on him and not the brighter sun. So while hurrying, looking through at an angle only, I made sure he was not centered so the metering point would be next to him more-so than right on him. Turned out it wasn't that cool, lol. I think the biggest negative about all these I got like that, was the fact he had his feathers so screwed up.
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Put your feathers/wings back down and look cooler darn it! Oh yeah and have a bald head while you are at it. I'm sure I'll have a billion more ops like that to place the sun right behind one...not.
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Now onto January 3rd with these. Learned one new important piece of info this day. Birds of prey like bald eagles love very windy days. I arrived around 2:00 and there were several up circling around. Thanks to the wind they could just hang up there with their wings spread out.
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This is actually a 100% crop from a not-so-sharp image....close enough. It's not going to be easy to get these guys to fill a frame with 400mm...this is for certain.
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I'm pretty sure this was another 100% crop.
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I was walking down the river again this day, when this hawk(?) jumped up out of the grass or low tree branch maybe 10 feet ahead of me. I of course wasn't ready.
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He circles right around to have a look at me. Lucky snap above as he nears a jet contrail. Too bad it's not that sharp. It gets pretty hard to manually focus on them as they move quickly towards you. Practice, practice, practice I guess.
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So I get there and find them circling and think, great! Well an hour later there were no eagles anywhere. I head back to the entrance and find this one watching the ducks. I stop and walk up the road toward him. He let me get pretty close.
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Notice his bloody beak and claws/feet. I was not far from him here, and this picture above is not even the whole shot. This is cropped in some. A person must need to be 20 feet from them to fill a frame at 400mm. I was probably 2 car lengths down the road from directly under him. I kept creeping at him, hoping to get him as he takes off. I slack off the last move and he jumps off while I'm not looking through the lens. Another eagle in this same spot does it to me again the next day. It's like they know. Also, I got a hawk right here. I was "sure" to get him as he jumped, after screwing up back to back eagles. I think he's going up as he leaves, but he goes down! I have his feet leaving the frame, lol.
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Anyway, this is that eagle above heading out to harass the ducks. The ducks sure do act up the second an eagle comes around. Check out that wingspan!
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Ok, now I'm there on the 4th. I arrived early to no activity. Eagles were all in the trees on the other side of the river, ducks nowhere to be found. So I sat on the river bank waiting on the eagles to do something. Then I hear ducks upstream. Evidently the ducks like to sit in the water in areas it's not flowing(and somehow not frozen....as the river is plum full of ice-chunks now). The ducks take off, soon followed by several of the eagles. Two eagles remained, for whatever reason. I watched them all head back into the refuge, over where you can't walk....sigh. I head to the entrance and find another eagle very near the location I saw the one the day before. It was funny to watch him watching me as I again got out of the car and tried to walk up the road to him. I got a hair closer this time, but not much(maybe 5 feet).
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Hawk in the same location a bit later. Blood on his chest and feet. Several of the hawks there aren't much smaller than the adult bald eagles. This one was not watching me at all. He was intently focused on something though.
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There are a TON of mallard ducks there right now, which is surprising this late. I really need to focus more effort on getting good shots of them in big groups like this above. This is only one small area in one field. It was getting very hard to understand how they were fitting in this one spot. Groups and groups were circling in and landing in there. Very few were leaving. They kept landing and somehow squeezing in. There were a lot right here, but a whole lot more seemed to be past the tree line in some other field you can't get to. There were other groups like this in this field alone, plus more like this in the one next to this one. But these close together fields combined were nowhere near what looked to be past the tree line. Click on the image to view a 100% version of it(I tossed it up to my flickr account...the one I rarely use.....both small and large versions were cropped in a bit from the original). They actually do weekly bird counts there. That has to be a blast. I believe the one count back in early December said 5,007 mallards. LOL.....and 7.
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If you use a telephoto lens and shoot groups of birds, you may find this little "trick" to be enjoyable. My example is not that great, but so far it is all I have. I plan on doing it a lot more, closer in with a lot more birds. You'll have a "sweet spot" you can put your shutter speed at where it will be fast enough so the birds don't blur too badly....but slow enough that their wings do. Seems to me it is right around 1/50th of a second. One just has to mess around with it. I know you can get something very cool if you try long enough and are ready...with a big group of birds, close in on them. Problem is it really only works as they first lift off. Then they aren't moving too fast yet, while their wings are. If they are landing it doesn't work well, as they are just holding their wings still. Hardest part will be pointing the camera at the flock and being ready the moment they take off. You can see this effect on the ducks above. Each duck's wing blur is a little different, some look very smeared...and I just know if you get the same shot on a lot more birds, closer in, it will look pretty cool. I was at 400mm, and 1/50th is getting sort of slow to be hand holding, even with IS on. Mounting the lens while doing this is surely a better idea. |
