LeClaire

All posts tagged LeClaire

Sunday ~ January 31, 2016

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

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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.

 

 

Saturday ~ January 16, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 16, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , .

January-15-2016

Happy Saturday!

I have Eagles for you today.  Yesterday I had to go to the Quad Cities to take my laptop in for a new battery.  I had decided earlier in the week that I was going to check out Lock and Dam #14 at LeClaire, Iowa as my friend Burt had said the eagles were there.  So after dropping off my laptop I headed over to the dam.

The shooting conditions were terrible.  If I hadn’t had to take my laptop to the repair shop I would have taken one look at the weather and said I’ll go to LD#14 another day.  Gray sky, foggy, biting wind, occasional mist and downright cold.  I knew it wasn’t going to be a banner day when I pulled into the parking lot and saw only 3 people on the observation deck.  Usually it is packed and there are people down on the rocks (as you can see in earlier posts.)

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I walked up to a lady closest to me and asked her if there had been any action.  She turned around, gave me a look (like duh) and said no and then turned around again.  I noticed that there was one adult eagle sitting on the “eagle tree” so I thought I might as well get my gear and see what I could come up with.

Turned out it wasn’t too bad (as far as eagles go.)  There were four adults, one young adult and later two juveniles showed up.  The young adult provided most of the action but occasionally the mature ones would take a stab at getting lunch.

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I have to admit I went back to my car a couple of times to warm up.  My body was okay but my hands and face were like ice and the camera and lens needed drying off and warmed up.  Anyway I used that as an excuse for going back to the car.  🙂

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This young adult couldn’t handle this large fish.  He never got more than a few feet in the air when he lost the fish.  He made several attempts to recover it with the same results.  😦

It took me all the way to Dubuque before I felt warmed up.  On the way back I almost hit a fox.  He was trying to cross the four lane highway at an intersection and was confused running from one side of the intersection to the other.  Fortunately I was able to slow down and miss him.  I followed him for about a mile hoping to get a shot of him but he took off across a field so he was safe but no photo opportunity.

That’s it for today.  Probably more eagle pictures tomorrow as I have a bunch.  I shot 1,229 images yesterday and I was happy with the results.  I really like the Tamron 150 – 600 mm lens.  Very sharp and fast focus plus lightweight enough to hand hold.  I used a tripod and gimbal most of the time yesterday but missed some shots because of the tripod.  There were some throw away images but for the most part I mainly threw away duplicates.  At 11 fps the D4 captures a lot of duplicates.  🙂

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

Monday ~ January 19, 2015

Posted by Dave Updegraff on January 19, 2015
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , , .

January-18-2015

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.)

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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.

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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.