Upde Designs

I heard from Andreas Saturday evening that he found no eagles at LD #14.  He tried several other places but what few eagles he found were too far away to capture an image of.  I felt bad for him because he hadn’t been able to shoot much the previous week.  I felt a little better about not being able to join him on Saturday.  I would have enjoyed his company of course, but when the mission is to capture images of eagles that’s what you would like to accomplish.

So Sunday afternoon the sunshine was bright and the temperature was in the low 30s so I decided to go back to Guttenburg.  I also decided to take the long slow drive up 52 highway just to see the sights.  There were several things I would have liked to capture on the way up but I would have been shooting directly into the sun so I just admired the view and hastened my pace.

When I arrived at my normal place, the ice had pulled farther from the dam and there were no eagles in sight.  The reason was clear at least in my mind, there were lots of fishermen below the dam.  Their boats constantly moving, crisscrossing in front of the dam.

Then I saw an Eagle fly from the far tree line to the middle of the river, swoop down and land in a tree just above the street closer to the dam.  I drove up to the area and parked.  I couldn’t get a clear shot of the eagle because there were too many branches so I decided to get closer from a different angle.  I was sure glad I did.  I got a wonderful image of him in the tree surveying the river Click here to see that image.  He tolerated me for a long time and then he took off.  My first thought was, well he’s gone.  No he had just spotted a fish and was on his way to catch his lunch.

After he caught the fish he flew around for awhile.  I have an image of him flying checking out the size of his catch (you remember I posted an image of a  juvenile  eagle doing that last week.)  Determining the fish was too large to eat he flew back to the tree right above my head.  After a few bites he started screeching.  I don’t know if he was bragging about his catch, alerting others to stay away, or telling others there were more fish in the river.  Suddenly there were more eagles over the dam.

So I had a lot of fun.  Still poor technique following eagles, so I had a lot of out of focus images, but I’m getting better.  No lens errors again and that makes me really happy.  The only problem was the new D4 has a sluggish shutter rate in cold weather.  If the camera is warm it performs fine but the two times I’ve had it in cold weather it seems to be pretty stiff at times.  I’ll give it a few more weeks and if that doesn’t improve I may have to send it in.

A small side story.  While I was photographing the eagles flying a guy came up to me (he had been enjoying some adult beverages, a lot of them.)  He said, “Hey that’s a nice looking camera.  The wife and I have been thinking of buying a camera like that to take pictures with.  What does one like that cost?”  I told him and he got this “deer in the headlight” look only a little cross-eyed from the beverages.  He said “Oh” and turned on his heels and wandered back into the bar.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by.  As you can imagine I have a bunch more eagle pictures but I won’t show you any tomorrow.  I’ve got other things to share for a couple of days.  Be careful.