Upde Designs

These images are from last Saturday’s shoot.  It was late in the day and we were losing the light so my shutter speed was slower than it needed to be.  As a result some of the action images below may be too soft for the purest among you but they do tell a story.

The two eagles above are preparing to defend the food stuff they have acquired.  What you can’t see in this images is what has them all in uproar.

I watched this eagle circling around the two on the ice and it looked like he was very interested in what they had to eat.  I’m not sure if he intended to try to hit the eagles or was just trying to make a good show of it but he came in too high and too fast.

He hit the ice hard and the ice shards flew as he kept on moving.  I really couldn’t see the look on his face but I would have thought he was thinking “damn I messed that landing up.” 🙂

He kicked up a lot of ice particles and did about a 90 degree turn on the ice.  It was pretty funny, which is why the camera was probably shaking a bit.

He finally came to a stop on the ice about 3 -4  feet away from his enemy.  You can see the ice particles still being kicked up by his talons digging into the ice for traction.   It took him a couple of seconds to compose himself and get himself ready for battle.

There was a pretty good tussle that ensued.  I captured most of it (that is the beauty of the D3 and its 11 fps burst.)  The bad news is the shutter speed was so slow that it just looks like brown and white blobs mushing together.

Fully composed now and ready to go after the food he musters his most fearsome pose and starts at the other two eagles in the first image.  Of course he lost his footing a couple of time before he got there but it was a pretty good fight for a while.

The one I really wished I could show you was when these three adults took on one juvenile and got it handed to them.

A few more eagle pictures coming.  In case your interested I had a good conversation with Adorama today.  They put another lens out for shipping to me today and apologized profusely.  I suppose it is possible they had a bad defect in one of their production runs.  A special thank you to Andreas for taking the time to give me some ideas about what might have caused the problem.  He has an engineering background so his suggestions and thoughts were very helpful and I thank him for that.

We’ll see as the saga continues.  Stay tuned.

By the way you can click on any of the images to enlarge them. Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Tuesday and be careful.