Loud and Clear

Photo of the Day

Today I went back to the Wabash River to find some more eagles. I went to my regular spot yesterday, but I only saw a couple of eagles. The pictures that I did manage to get yesterday were not that special. I am beyond just getting a picture of an eagle now. I would like to see some sort of action, or anything that sticks out to me. Today I went out with that in mind trying to find something interesting to me. I went to my usual spot, but things were looking slow just like yesterday. I decided to try a new location. I went out behind an apartment complex that is right on the river. What I found was a gold mine. There is a small retention pond behind the complex where the eagles seemed to like to hang out. I saw anywhere from 8-10 eagles at a time there. For a while I was concentrating on making pictures of two eagles on a couple of pieces of driftwood pretty far away from me. I knew that I would be near the end of my range, but they looked to cool to not make a picture of. While I was watching them a third eagle showed up. That one was not treated so well by the other two. The picture above shows one of the eagles showing his disapproval with a loud screeching sound. On my Facebook page (linked here) I have posted a couple images of the eagle flying away to avoid conflict.

Technical Data

I used my 70-200mm lens with the 1.4x extender on it to take this shot. On my crop sensor camera that gives me about 448mm of lens. For a football game that would be great. For something like this though I should have a bit more for a crisp picture. I had to crop quite a bit in Lightroom to get the eagles to somewhere that details could be seen. By doing so though I introduced quite a bit of noise as it was way too zoomed in. That meant that I could not really do much here except for a highlight shift. Anything else was just too noisy. I have to find a way to get my hands on a 400mm or a 600mm lens for a couple of days. With my extender I would be right in range to get some very interesting shots. Normally I would zoom with my feet, but here the landscape makes that impossible. I will keep going to the eagles though with what I have hoping that they help me out and come a bit closer.