Saturday ~ February 06, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 6, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , .

February-06-2016-01-31-16

Happy Saturday!

I was able to get through some more of my eagle images from a week ago yesterday and came across this one.  It was near the end of the day as you can see from the softer yellow light on his wings.  This is a young adult.  He still has a lot of white to fill in yet but the look of his eyes tells me that he is focused on finding food.  (click on the image to make it larger.)

I wasn’t able to go to Lock and Dam 14 yesterday because I had to get a haircut, had a doctor appointment, and a variety of other “honey do” errands to take care of.  Later in the afternoon I did get out with camera in hand but didn’t find much.  I found a cardinal but I only had the Nikon 80 – 400 mm lens and he was far enough away that I couldn’t get a good clean shot of him.  Still it was a cardinal and I might show him later.  I photographed some barns as well but I can’t seem to quit coming back to the eagle images.

I’ve just about reached the end of them and have only culled about 175.  So that still leaves me with about 1,500 keepers.  Don’t worry I won’t show them all.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Friday ~ February 05, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 5, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , .

February-05-2016-01-31-16

Happy Friday!

If you can only get one bird in focus, which one do you try for?  I was practicing on the gull while waiting for the eagles to fly and guess who flew into my view finder?

Short post today.  Lots to do and I’m late.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Thursday ~ February 04, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 4, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , .

February-04-2016-01-31-16-B

Happy Thursday!

Sorry more eagle images for your today.  I am just enamored with eagles.  Unfortunately for me I have some appointments in Dubuque tomorrow so I won’t be going back to Lock & Dam 14.  It’s also like (for me) how can I top last Friday?

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So I’m going to have to find other things to photograph this weekend.  🙂

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Not much babble today.  Lots to do before I leave for work.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Wednesday ~ February 03, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 3, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , .

February-03-2016-01-31-16-B

Happy Wednesday!

Some more eagle images for you today.  I want to show you some of my mistakes and what can happen when you get busy visiting with other photographers and not paying attention.  🙂

I was watching some geese fly over the area and happened to notice all the lenses pointing over my head.  I had the lens set on 400 mm and this is what I got.  Not a very good composure but on the other hand you could call it up close and personal. 🙂

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For this image I was busy visiting with my friend Burt and totally missed the catch of this juvenile.  He does have a fish in his talons and you can still see the spray of the water.  All I got was three frames of river water before I finally caught up to him.

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This guy pivoted and was headed for a catch.  I did a good job of following him down until all I could see in my view finder was brown blur.  There were photographers leaning over the railing and I was getting the back of their insulated jackets.  So I missed his catch as well.

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Here is another miss.  I caught up with him just after he had snagged his lunch.  Probably visiting again.  🙂

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There weren’t many juveniles at the lock when I was there.  A couple flew over and I captured this image.  For the most part the adults were having the most success on this day.

That’s it for today.  I have lots more eagle images but I’ll give them a rest for a few days and see if I can find something else of interest.  Truth be told however I could photograph eagles every day and I don’t think I would get tired of them.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

 

Tuesday ~ February 02, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 2, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , .

September-26-2015

Happy Tuesday!

I’ll take a break from all the eagle images to wish my Son, Mark a Happy 25th Birthday.  I’m extremely proud of him and how he has taken control of his life and his success.  He and a couple of friends just got back from Las Vegas.  Now that’s a cool way to celebrate a birthday!  🙂

Like I said I’m taking a break from the eagles (oh yes, I’ve got a ton more images) but I don’t want you to get tired of them and there are other things to photograph.

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Like this little Princess.  We were invited to Angie and Ben’s home for dinner Sunday evening.  It’s always a treat to be with them.  I do my best to grab a few snap shots of the grand kids while there.  I asked Gabby if I could take her picture.  She gave me  some really weird poses and I finally waited till she quit posing and snapped this one.  I won’t show the others because…  Well just because.

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I tried to get all three kids together but this is the best I could do.  Austin loves this bouncing seat and he will entertain himself for a long time.  It’s fun to watch him bounce and laugh.  Sometimes he get to laughing so hard he has to stop bouncing for a bit.  🙂

As I write this blog the snow is falling hard and the cancellations are mounting.  I’m tempted to take a PTO today but I’ve been away for a long time and the work doesn’t get done by itself so I will make the effort to get in this morning.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Monday ~ February 01, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on February 1, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , .

February-01-2016-01-29-2016-1A

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.  🙂

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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.

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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.

 

Sunday ~ January 31, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 31, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , .

January-31-2016-01-29-2016-A

Happy Sunday!

More eagle images today.  I still have not been all the way through the images from the Friday shoot.  I have only looked at about half of them and have deleted 97 of them.  That’s a pretty high keeper rate for me.  I’m showing you three flying eagle images today.  These are pretty much the way they came out of the camera with just a little “high pass” sharpening.  This can give you an idea of just how close the eagles were on Friday.  It was a lot of fun photographing them.

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On a personal note a small feeling of triumph this morning.  My old Mac Book Pro (2011 version) stopped working.  This is the one that I made two trips to Davenport to get a new battery put in at a cost of $170.  It worked for a week and then I turned it on Thursday and got a “green apple” on the start-up screen and then just a blank white screen with no functionality.  I did a Google® search on the symptoms and all the articles I found pretty much spelled doom for the machine.  I tried some of the suggested remedies with no positive results.  Finally decided this weekend I would take the hard drive out of the machine and trash the computer.

This morning before doing that I decided to give it one more try.  This time I went to the Apple website and did some searching.  They recommended 7 steps getting progressively more intense to see if functionality could be restored.  Each step I took had negative results and I became more frustrated and reconciled that the laptop was toast.  I got to step 7 and the same result with one minor exception.  I saw a progress bar for a brief moment (I hadn’t seen that before) and then a blank screen again.  Frustrated I decided to go eat breakfast before disassembling the laptop.  Fortunately I left it turned on and when I came back from breakfast I had a log in screen.  It had booted into “safe mode”, which was the last step I tried and gave me some options for repairs.

The rest of the story is that now it is working like a new machine.  Whew!  I’m glad I didn’t start taking it apart.  🙂

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I plan to get through the rest of the images today and cull it down but I don’t expect to have a lot of throw a ways.

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Saturday ~ January 30, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 30, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , .

January-29-2016

Happy Saturday!

If you have read the last few posts about my photography experience at Lock and Dam #14 in LeClaire, Iowa then you know that I have lamented about the lousy shooting conditions (weather wise) the two days I was there.  Well yesterday was like a day in paradise.  The sun was out, the temperature wasn’t bitterly cold and the eagles were flying.

There were a lot of photographers there and even a couple of buses came in after I was there but I found a spot on the observation deck that although not perfect for the angle of the sun was pretty close to perfect.  I was supposed to meet my friend Andreas at the dam but his work prevented him from coming as I leaned from his text while standing on the lock walkway.  I know he was disappointed.

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I did run into my friend Burt Gearhart and had a nice visit with him.  He is very helpful and shares a lot of his knowledge about the lock and dam and photographing eagles.  Google his name and you’ll see a lot of great eagle images.

Other than the time that I had the up close and personal experience with the eagle on the highway a couple of years ago (Click Here To View) I have never been so close to eagles and certainly not while they were flying.  There were times it felt like I could reach up and touch them.  More than once I took my eye out of the camera just to appreciate the beauty of them flying (more like floating) overhead.

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Trying to follow this eagle from attack approach to capture of the fish proved to be a challenge for me.  I was a little slow and low on this shot but wanted to show it because I wanted to show the moment of capture.  🙂

So I took 1,606 images and as I write the blog this morning I have not yet been through them all.  Just too many to evaluate and it was busy when I got home so by the time I got the images loaded on my computer it was just too late to look through them.  The images I’m showing today were the first ones out of the camera.

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With the fish securely in his talons he is off to the feeding trees to eat his catch.  There were a lot of fish in the water at one time over 5 fish floating and several eagles in the trees but they didn’t seem all that interested.  More about the floating fish in a later post.

You can probably imagine that with that many images you’re probably going to see a lot of eagle images on this blog for a while.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Remember you can click on the images to make them larger.

Enjoy your day and be careful.

 

 

Tuesday ~ January 26, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 26, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , .

January-25-2016

Happy Tuesday!

Yes I know it’s a common Mallard Duck.  I think they are a wonderful looking bird and I enjoy photographing them.  I found these guys at the Bee Branch Project, enjoying the open water and each others company.  I actually think I can see this guy’s eye looking back at me as he slowly swims away.

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As I approached (even though I tried to be stealthy) they all started swimming away from me.  Not fast just a slow, “lets act nonchalant” type of swim.  🙂

There were probably 50 or more ducks in the creek where I was.

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I just stood motionless for a few minutes and they slowly started coming back to where they had been, which let me get up close and personal with a couple of them.  After a while they didn’t seem to mind me being there.

That’s it for today.  Probably no blog tomorrow as I have a late evening meeting and a busy day so no time for photography.  😦

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Monday ~ January 25, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 25, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , .

January-22-2016-AXX

Happy Monday!

The last of the eagle images for you today from my Friday shoot.  As I said in earlier posts pickings were pretty slim with only three eagles in the area.

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This little guy flew by my lens so I ripped off some images of him.  This is the only one I caught the entire bird.  Sorry I don’t know the name of this species.

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The last image I took was of this eagle sitting in what is called “The feeding trees.”   For some reason you can get up close and personal with them and they won’t fly away.  Things were so desperate on Friday that three of us were photographing this guy at the same time.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Weather doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a good photography day so I probably will just take some more lessons.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.