Eagle III

Hi Walt,
The diagonal presentation looks good. I would have liked some feather detail under the wings. The head has motion blur which is a major issue with avian photography. If nothing else is sharp the head/eyes need to be sharp in my opinion.
Thanks for posting,
Ronnie G.

The eagle is in a terrific position, and looking right at us. Great!
Even though the top of the white head seem properly exposed, having the light from above and the underside of the wings in shadow makes the whole bird seem under-exposed.

Walt,

I like the flight pose and the way the eagle seems to be looking at you. I think if you were to try to lighten the darks enough to show detail under the wings that noise would be a problem.

There isn't much to be done about the lack of sharpness shown and overall darkness here but there are some steps in the field that you can take in the future to improve your results. One would be to increase your ISO to gain shutter speed, 1/400 is often to slow for birds in flight, I try to keep the shutter speed at /1000 or above for flight shots. I think using F11 hurt the IQ too because it slowed down your shutter speed some as well.

Last, even one to two steps of positive ev comp would have helped to lighten the darks against the blue sky.

Walt it looks like you had some great opportunities there. The D90 has pretty good higher iso capabilities so you could of gone maybe iso 640 maybe 800 to get the shutter speed to where it needed to be. Also you probably could have used an f/7.1 or which would have help on the shutter speed as Mia has mentioned. One more thing is when you are shooting darker birds against a brighter sky you need to dial in some + exposure to expose the darker browns of the feathers. I hope this helps a bit. Keeeping practicing them BIF's!!

Thanks so much to you all for all the great help. So much to learn. I'll go out and practice it so the next time the action starts maybe I'll be able to remember all this!