Upde Designs

Happy Monday!

Today I have a series of 8 eagle images for you that begin with the eagle as he has left the eagle tree and is on a mission to catch a fish floating in the water.  Remember you can click on any of the images to make them larger.  I think the thing that impresses me most about this series of images is the single solid focus of the eagle on his prey.

I’ll give you the camera specs for this series.  They were captured at 2:05 p.m. using a Nikon D4 | Nikon 200 – 500 mm F5.6 lens | ISO 560 1/1600 sec @f8.0

The thing I love about the D4 is the 11 fps and its huge buffer.  You can rip off a lot of shots and get all the action before it has to stop and write to the memory card.

As discussed in previous posts the weather conditions were pretty good.  Sunny day with some cloud cover.  Temperature about 31 degrees with a fair amount of wind.  It was cold for sure but we were all dressed for it.

It gets pretty crowded on the observation walkway.  At one point I was trying to follow an eagle as he swooped down to catch a fish and all of a sudden I had nothing but brown in my view finder.  Some guy had leaned over the railing in front of me to get the shot preventing me from getting it.  That is when I decided to move a little closer to the dam and give up the butt shots of the eagles flying away after their catch because I would have been shooting straight into the sun.  (I did that once by the way.)

You’ll notice that the fish is floating “belly up” on the water.  There are people, (avid photographers) who don’t want to take a chance of missing some eagle shots so they bring frozen fish.  I’ll show you tomorrow what they do to ensure they float.  🙂

As you can see in the last few shots I’m lagging a bit behind the eagle.  The shutter is going so fast that sometimes I can’t always see where the bird is so I have to just keep panning.  Like I said I got a little behind on some of these shots.

So here is the last image with the fish securely ensconced in his talons and he starts to gain altitude headed for the feeding trees for his feast.

That’s it for today.  Hope you enjoyed this sequence of the catch.  Enjoy your day.  Sounds like we’re supposed to get a huge snow storm tonight and tomorrow in our part of the world.  So be careful.