Happy Monday!
Welcome to Eagle week.
I met a man a few years ago (actually through this blog) by the name of Burt Gearhart and his wife Marylin live in LeClaire, Iowa. Burt is a retired software engineer and an avid photographer. He loves to capture images of wildlife in general but his favorite is eagles. He shoots almost everyday at the wonderful Lock & Dam 14 in LeClaire. It is an eagle photographer’s paradise.
Burt graciously invited Andreas, Jeanne, I to a presentation he was doing in LeClaire about eagles and about his photography. He has some magnificent images of eagles, flying, fishing, fighting, and feeding. He has done a very skilful job. I would link you to his website but I’m not sure what the address is. He has many but some are not updated on a regular basis. (hint.)
So Jeanne and I drove down to LeClaire had lunch and made it to the center where Burt was presenting. We were actually on time. Andreas showed up a few minutes after we did.
It was a wonderful presentation and all the time I was watching it I was getting anxious to get out to the Lock and Dam.
When we arrived at the lock and dam it was wall to wall photographers. The parking lot was liquid mud and there were cameras and big lenses everywhere. I started salivating. 🙂
No room on the observation walkway so I climbed down on some rocks and did some shooting. It was amazing how out of practice I was. I had configured the camera before hand so I didn’t have to worry about that but tracking the birds and keeping up with them proved to be a challenge for awhile. When you don’t do it very often you get rusty.
I shot 855 images with the Nikon D4 | Tamron 150 – 600 mm lens | manual mode 1/1250 sec @ f8.0 | -7 / -1.3 EV | and let the camera pick the ISO. Lots of sunshine so never really had to hit much higher than 640 ISO. I got a lot of trash can shots, some reasonable shots and some pretty darn good shots and then a couple of really lucky shots.
So if you like eagles, stay tuned, I’m showing them (not all 855) in the order they came out of the camera. So please check back cause that’s what I’ll have all week. Thanks to Burt for the invite and as always great to visit and shoot with Andreas.
Thanks for stopping by the blog. Enjoy your day and be careful.
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