Standby Eagle

I've posted this in a couple Google+ communities and thought I'd post it here. It's not a particularly special bald eagle photo but it is somewhat unique because of the way it was taken. I just bought a Sony a6000 and was learning how to use it by shooting photos of eagles along the coastline at Valdez, Alaska. This eagle was deeply back into the spruce trees but the sun was sneaking through and lighting him up. The trouble was that with the deep shadows the contrast (dynamic range) was pretty extreme and I was having trouble getting decent exposure on his dark feathers without blowing out the white head. Then just for kicks I thought I would try a new feature of the a6000 that I had used for a couple landscapes. You set it in HDR mode and take the shot the way you normally would but it brackets your shot with a brighter and darker exposure (3 shots total), aligns the images and does an HDR blend in the camera and saves two shots. One is the shot as you took it and another that is the finished HDR blend. The eagle was still enough and it shoots the shots fast enough that I thought it just might work. This image is the blended HDR result. The really fun part of it all is that it was taken at full zoom of my 55-210 (315 mm equiv.) and was handheld over my head because I had to shoot through a small available hole in the branches of the trees in front.

These are the settings of the middle exposure: ISO-100, f6.3, 210mm, 1/60 handheld.