Good-Lookin' Eagle

Hi everyone! John here. I wanted to introduce you to yet another wildlife photographer-in-the-making in our family, my 8yr old son, Josiah. (If you read my introduction on Josiah's first post on the wildlife gallery, this is pretty much the same so feel free to skip down to the good part for Josiah's comments below.)

Jim and I spoke almost a year ago about setting up a membership for Josiah, but my wife and I decided to give him a little more time to see if this was something he really wanted to do. Turns out it is, and he appears to be following in his big sister's (Jenaya's) footsteps.

Posts from Josiah will be a little different, as will his comments on other images I expect, as for the time being he is relying on me or his sisters to help him out on this front...but he spends a ton of time every week looking through the wonderful pictures here, and is excited to be able to express his appreciation with comments now.

I also wanted to mention something I know I would have been wondering about. Josiah's pictures really are HIS pictures. What I mean by that is I do NOT believe in setting the camera up on the tripod, get all the settings and focus right, and having him come and press the button. Josiah often wanders off "on his own" with one of my cameras and lenses as Jenaya or Marlise and I are engrossed in some wildlife subject, and returns with a dozen or so pictures to show us. Jenaya and I do offer suggestions for ISO or aperture sometimes, or exposure compensation if he tells us his highlights are blown, etc.

In any event, Josiah is a huge wildlife lover and is often the first member of the family to ask to go out in search of something to photograph. He is known in the family as my "bighorn buddy" because he loves hiking up with me for pictures of them! He also loves photographing bears, wolves, marmots, owls...and as you can see here, eagles.

And this is where I'll let Josiah introduce his very first picture on the Avian Gallery (and in this case, I had headed off after pictures of a different eagle and was 30yds away, watching him work his angles as he found something he liked). Sadly he needed more light to get above 1/500sec to freeze the eagle's motion as it pivoted here (hence the lack of a larger version), but he loves the look of this one and wanted to share it all the same. Thanks in advance for letting him be part of the community here despite his young age. I think you'll find him to be a great guy and remarkably observant and thoughtful for his age.

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(from Josiah)
This is a good-lookin' eagle! Every time he flew by I told my dad that! I wanted to photograph some eagles so my dad took me to a river near our home that had a nest near it. We found the eagles hunting for fish when we got there. Every time he flew by I followed him with my camera and took a few pictures. One time just when I was about to take a picture he suddenly turned in the air to dive down, and I got this picture!

I know the face isn't super sharp but I like the way he looks with his wings and tail spread out and that you can see his talons. I also like how there's a little bit of cloud showing in the background against the blue sky.

A little bit after this picture he flew over to the other side of the river and chased off a hawk!

Thank you for looking!

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Nikon D2X
Nikkor AF-S 300mm f/4 IF-ED with 1.4X TC
ISO 400
1/500sec @ f/5.6
-0.3EV (I suggested he do this to preserve details in whites)
monopod
cropped to about 50% of original