Upde Designs

Nikon D3S | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 400 1/640 sec @ f8.0

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We certainly did.  Celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary and had a wonderful evening of dinner and a movie.  Well actually the movie was first at 4:00 pm and then dinner.

Let me rant a little on that.  We went to the 4:00 pm movie thinking it would be  a little discounted (and maybe it was, who knows) but the tickets for two of us was $20.  Okay I guess if you’re looking at 2.5 hours of entertainment $10 per person is not bad.  But then I went to the concession stand.  I got a kiddy bag of popcorn for Jeanne and the smallest (non kiddy) bag of popcorn and a small diet Coke…. $15.75.  I almost said to the kid behind the counter, “you’ve got to be sh***ing me.”  fortunately I didn’t, I just smiled and handed him $20.  😦

Nikon D3 | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 200 1/450 sec @ f8.0

Okay enough about that.  This is a photography blog.  🙂  So yesterday morning Jeanne and I headed out to look for some eagles that my Friend Dave said were back at the feeding trough.   There is a trapper who dumps his trapping carcases in a field and it attracts lots and lots of eagles.

When we arrived there were between 25 – 30 eagles.  Both juvenile and mature eagles were there along with some brave crows.  I was able to drive up very slowly and get into to position and the eagles were remarkably unconcerned with my presence.  There were a couple that flew away but they soon came back as the buffet was full of food.

To be honest I do not really like shooting eagles this way or at this place.  I was shooting directly into the sun (which was very bright) and we were far enough away that it was difficult to get a sharp focus on the birds.  That plus the fact that I haven’t shot with the 500 mm lens since last March made for some lousy images.

And as a friend of mine says shooting with a junk lens.  However my friend Andreas shoots with a similar lens and he produces excellent images.  He has learned to shoot around the short comings of the lens.  So it was more my technique or lack of it that accounted for the poor image quality.

Nikon D3S | Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM APO lens | ISO 400 1/640 sec @ f8.0

So I shot 687 images of the eagles, 60 survived the first round of cuts and then only 21.  Of that 21 these were the best three. 😦  So as you can see it wasn’t a productive shoot.  Having said that we got to watch eagles fight and scuffle for about an hour and a half so it made it all worth while.

We drove around a 100 miles yesterday looking for interesting things to shoot.  The scenery this time of year is pretty blah.  I took 8 images in that two-hour drive.  Just couldn’t find anything of interest.  Well maybe a couple of images I’ll show tomorrow.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Monday.  I’m off today (using up the last of my vacation time) so I will get out today and look some more.  You are correct Betty, we all need to be careful.