Upde Designs

On March 03, 2013 I posted an image of Josh taking my picture with Mama Jeanne’s point and shoot camera.  The image above is that picture.  Most of the picture is Josh’s but I did do all the post processing for him.  Cropping, color balance, sharpening.  I didn’t use liquify brush to make me look thinner although I thought about it.

If you want to scroll down you can see the original post which again was March 03, 2013.

This is my capture of Josh taking the first picture in this post.  He actually wasn’t this close to me as I had zoomed in to the full focal length of the lens which was 120 mm.  So the little point and shoot did a good job.

Thanks for stopping by.  I took a day off yesterday as I twisted my knee somehow and could barely walk.  Much better today although I’m still walking with a noticeable limp.  Jeanne said (although not in these exact words) I’m a baby.  🙂  I don’t like pain.  Enjoy your Saturday.  The rain is doing the job on the driveway that I didn’t do.  🙂  Be careful.

I was actually ahead of schedule yesterday morning.  WAS ahead of schedule until I starting looking at all the wonderful scenery covered in frost from the morning fog.  It was a beautiful drive in yesterday.  I shot about 25 images most of which required me parking on the traveled part of the roadway and walking over to the shoulder, and standing ankle-deep in snow.  Totally worth it but of course I was 10 minutes late getting to work.

I have photographed this structure several times but I just really like the looks of it.  The morning sun was bathing it in a soft, warm, yellow light and I had to capture that image.

I had lunch with a friend from work yesterday.  He is only a couple of weeks away from retirement and I wanted to take him to lunch to celebrate his accomplishments and his retirement.

We work in totally different areas and he has a lot of on-going customer interaction so I have not spent the amount of time with him that I otherwise would have.  I learned more about him yesterday than I’ve known before.  He is a quality individual (I’ve always known that) and he and his kind nature will be missed at work both by his customers and his co-workers.

He’s only a year older than me but fortunately he doesn’t have any hobbies that suck up a lot of money so he can afford to retire. 🙂 I wish you well Jack and hope your retirement is wonderful and gives you much joy.

That’s it for today.  Enjoy your Friday.  There are only 52 of them each year so make it a GREAT day.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.  You never know when you’ll top a hill and there will be some nut stopped in the middle of the road taking pictures of some weeds.  🙂

I was looking through my images this morning thinking about this post and I spent about 20 minutes looking through my Sunday shoot at Guttenburg.   These are the best eagle images I have every captured.  My friend Andreas even said that “They are getting better.”  I still have about 20 images from that shoot that I really want to show you but they will wait for another day.  I don’t want you coming to the blog and saying “Oh great more @$$^&$# eagles.”

I worked from home yesterday.  I guess as I get older and hopefully a little wiser, I understand it doesn’t make sense to risk an accident or getting stuck in the median, when I can accomplish most of my work from home.  In this electronic age with virtual networks and smart phones there is very little of my assignments that I cannot accomplish no matter where I’m at as long as I can connect to the net.

Back to the office today and today by the way is my 13th anniversary at work.  Hard to believe that I’ve been there that long.  It is a great organization and wonderful people who I work with and for.   I enjoy the work that I do  and so at least for a few more years as long as I can make a contribution I will keep doing what I do.  If I didn’t have this damn NAS* I could probably retire.

The image above is of Josh and Angie from last week.  I just love what it says to me and hopefully to you as well.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

* NAS = Nikon Acquisition Syndrome

Good Day.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  A quick post this morning and of course it is another eagle image.  There may be a lot of things wrong with this image but I feel so lucky to have gotten it.  There is a lot of distractions in the frame that could have thrown off the auto focus (all the small branches) but I was lucky enough to get a sharp image of the eagle and his catch of the day.  He landed in this tree just above me and proceeded to devour his catch.

I have some images of him dinning but they are not very attractive and a little messy.  🙂  So I’ll spare you the nature part of this sequence.  (You can click on the image to make it larger.)

Enjoy your snowy day.  I’m still trying to decide whether to work from home or take a chance on the roads.  Be careful.

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.

It’s been awhile since I last blogged.  Either I didn’t have anything worth saying, or showing, or I just didn’t feel like blogging.  Take your pick.  We were blessed to have Angie and Josh over for dinner and a visit two days in a row as Ben was out-of-town attending a conference.  It was a real treat and I have some fun photos of Josh that I’ll share another time.

Mama Jeanne gave Josh her old point and shoot camera to play with.   After she turned it on for him he ran over to the “big boy” rocking chair and practiced his technique.

I saw the image of me he took.  It is a great image because I have the camera up to my eye so you can’t see any of my face and the perspective he took the shot from made me look thinner.  The kid is going to be a natural photographic genius. I looked for Jeanne’s camera this morning but she must have taken it with her when she went to visit her Mother this weekend.  I wanted to show you the picture he took.

He had an admiring audience giving praise and kudos to his work.  The ever humble artist is paying no attention to his admires and is only interested in enjoying his own work.  He had a lot of fun with the camera.  If you’ll look closely at the second image you will see that he has developed a pretty good technique for holding and firing the camera.  I call it the three finger shooting position.  🙂  It was working pretty well and then he decided to reverse the camera and look through the lens.  That didn’t work so well. 🙂

Enjoy your Sunday.  Thank you as always for taking time to check out the blog.  I spent about 5 hours yesterday at the Mexican Restaurant trying to get their website finalized and launched.  We did make some progress, I think.

Be careful.

I have two apologies about today’s post.  First there are more eagle pictures.  I’m sorry but this series of images tells a neat story so I felt compelled to show you these images.  Secondly I apologize for the lack of sharpness of these images.  This juvenile eagle was flying very close to a fence and the auto focus kept jumping between the eagle and the fence so they are not tack sharp images. Aside from that these are some fun images.

You may remember I told you a couple of days ago how the juvenile eagles would time after time come up empty-handed and would then try to steal fish from the more successful mature eagles.  Well as I was sorting through my images from the Guttenburg shoot I had this series of images slated for deletion until I got to the last image.  Just a reminder you can click on the images and make them much larger and easier to see the detail.

I captured the first image in this series of the eagle coming in for a catch.  I could not get the image of him actually striking the water because he was behind the fence.  However as he circled and gained a little altitude it appeared at first glance that his talons were empty.

Jeanne and I went to a talk on eagles last year put on by a photographer from the Des Moines, Iowa area.  He wrote a book about the return of eagles to Iowa and had many wonderful images of eagles.

One of the things he said was that often times an eagle will look down at his catch and if the fish is small enough he will eat it on the fly so that he doesn’t have to defend his food while he eats it.

So this eagle is doing that and again when I first went through the images I though to myself… Young kid, doesn’t even realize he has nothing in his talons.  Boy was I wrong.

This fish won’t win any big fish trophies but it is at least food and this young eagle promptly devoured it  By the third frame of this series the fish was gone.  🙂

I love capturing images of eagles.  I can stand in the cold and watch them for hours having their little turf and food battles.  I enjoy watching them interact and even just sitting.  They are such a magnificent creature.  Don’t be surprised if you continue to see images of eagles from time to time on this blog.

That’s it for today gotta run.  Hope you enjoyed this young eagle’s success.  Thank you for stopping by.  Enjoy your day (each one is a gift you know) and please be careful.

I know that I haven’t had many images of this little guy for awhile.  It’s my fault as I’ve had the opportunity and was just busy doing other things that were not nearly as important.  Anyway Angie and Josh stopped over for a visit Friday evening and had pizza with us.  We had a great time playing in the “toy room” as our kids called it.  Josh still finds the toys his Mom and Uncle played with to be fun and interesting.  No they don’t light up and talk to him but he can use his imagination and have so much fun pretending.

His new thing is now that he will say, “I’ll be right back.”  Then he disappears (usually to flip on a light switch) for a couple of minutes and then he comes back and starts playing again.  I remember with his Mother did that as well.  🙂

Short post this morning as I have to go clear the driveway of snow and head out for work.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your slippery Wednesday.  Be careful.

A full five-day work week this week.  I’ve had a four-day work week the last three weeks so this is going to seem like a long week.  Saturday Jeanne and I drove up to Guttenburg, Iowa to see if the eagles were still busy around the dam.  It was about 20 degrees with a light wind but it was uncomfortably cold none the less.  The river ice had changed in the week since I was last there.   Where I stood and shot images of eagles last week was no longer there.  The ice had moved closer to the dam and there were no eagles sitting on the ice.

So we moved closer to the dam, which limited the shooting range because of the fences around the dam.  The good news was there were lots and lots of eagles fishing just below the dam.  When we first were parking the car on the main street by the dam a mature eagle with a fish in his talon was being chased by a juvenile who wanted to take it away.  They came close enough I could have gotten a frame filling image with a 70 mm lens.  Unfortunately the camera and lens were in the back seat and I was still strapped in with my seat belt.

I’ve heard of deer hunters getting what is called “Buck Fever” being so excited they couldn’t pull the trigger.  That’s what I felt when they flew over, I don’t remember ever being that close to a wild eagle in my life.  Some good news about the lens.  It never miss behaved once Saturday.  I shot 1,140 images and not one black frame in the bunch.  🙂  I have a ton of out of focus images but that was all 100% my error.  I don’t know why I shoot some many frames when I’m shooting eagles.  I know what works and what doesn’t but I get pretty excited I guess and try to capture every thing that happens.

My good Friend Dave told me something about the fishing below the dam that eagles do.  He said that when fish go through the dam many times they get stunned and will float on top of the water for a period of time.  It makes easy pickings for the eagles soaring overhead.

The most interesting thing I saw Saturday was the number of attempted take aways.  Mostly from juvenile eagles who would time after time hit the water for a fish only to come up empty-handed.  I have tons of images showing that to be the case.  But a mature eagle would catch a fish and there would be one or two juveniles trying to grab it away from the mature eagle.  I have seen some of that before but not to the extent I did Saturday.

We stayed at the dam for about an hour and then decided to come home through the country.  Saw a lot of barns I should have photographed but the sunlight was pretty harsh and so I passed on all of them.    Thank you for checking out the blog.  I hope you enjoy your Monday.  I’ll have some non-eagle images tomorrow.  Be careful.