Upde Designs

Another beautiful day for photography yesterday.  I thought about going to LD # 14 again but I received an e-mail from Burt and he said there were no eagles there.  So I decided to go our lock and dam instead.

First stop was at the 14th street stream.  Lots of Mallards there today and there were some young children standing on the bridge with their parents throwing bread crumbs.  The image above shows how much the ducks and geese were enjoying the free meal.

I shot about 100 images at the pond.  I originally started out with the 50 – 500 mm lens on the D700 but I couldn’t get it to focus sharply on anything.  Everything I took looked soft.  So I put it back on the D3 and everything looked great.

After about 45 minutes of shooting Mallards I decided to go over to the lock and dam.

There were a lot of people there and it didn’t take long to see why there was a crowd.  There was one eagle sitting at the top of a tree in full view.  He didn’t seem to mind all the people coming close to him.  This is the closest I’ve ever come to an eagle.

There was another one sitting in a tree a little South of him but he was really hidden by the branches.  I then went back to the body of water where we found the eagles Saturday and they were there again.  I was very excited because there were two eagles on the ice and two flying over head looking for fish.

I got the camera set up and started to take some images and it happened again.  The damn lens froze up.  It was like the focusing motor was fried.  Couldn’t get it to work with either camera.  Ugh!!!  The flying eagles were very close too.  😦

I tried the lens again last night before going to be and it is toast.  It won’t focus or make any type of movement.  I’m done with Sigma products.  My only other alternative is Tamron.  <Sigh>

Enjoy your Monday.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.