Starved Rock Eagle

Gallery: AvianPosted January 8, 2017155 views3 comments

I headed out to Starved Rock today to see the eagles. I would estimate 20 to 30 eagles were in various trees or hunting for food.
The temperature was 3 degrees. I took 340 photos and a few came out okay. I seemed to have trouble focusing the lens for some reason. There were several shots of eagles in flight where I had the composition but they were soft.
This photo was taken on top of Starved Rock itself looking slightly downward. Six eagles were present with three in two different trees. This was the best bird to photograph due to the amount of branches in the way. I did try to remove a few nuisance branches that were in front of the bird.

Canon T5i
Sigma 150-600 C @ 562
F 7.1
Shutter 1/1000
ISO 1600. I was using auto ISO. Did I break a cardinal rule on this?

As always comments are more than welcome. I have a lot to learn.
Regards,
Brian

Comments

3 comments

Comment posted by Dennis Plank on January 8, 2017 at 9:15 PM

Pretty good detail in the eagle, Brian. It looks like it might be a bit hot on the top of the head. As for auto iso, I don't think there's any set rule. I've never used it, but I know others who think it's wonderful. For eagles, where some are going ot be in flight against the sky and some perched like this, I usually use manual exposure. You can set the camera to Av mode with a reasonable iso (probably about 640 for your camera) to get a reasonable starting point, then just shoot anything white in the sun (assuming you have sun) and adjust by the histogram until the whites are just inside the limit. Then it doesn't matter what the background is, the exposure will work. If you have some clouds, you'll need to adjust when a cloud comes in front of the sun, but you'll soon learn how much adjustment is needed. Focus in flight shots is more difficult to answer. I don't know what the AF points on the T5i are like, but if you select the center point and a few of the surrounding points, it will grab focus quicker than a single point with a sky background and have less chance of refocusing on the background when the eagle moves in front of trees than if you had all the points selected.

devil

Registered on January 28, 2008, 1767 Posts, 23192 Comments

Comment posted by Pete Bengeyfield on January 9, 2017 at 5:10 PM

I usually don't like bright spots in teh BG, but here I think they add to the image.

Registered on December 2, 2003, 1247 Posts, 3439 Comments

Comment posted by Charlie VanTassel on January 10, 2017 at 1:10 PM

If auto iso is giving you iso 1600, I would turn it off. It looks like you had plenty of light so I'm not sure why the auto iso would go so high. Better to just set an iso and then use plus or minus EV to compensate if needed. This will help you to get some detail in the dark area of the bird on a cloudy day. I like the overall composition. Of course, it would have been nice to find one sitting in a place where you didn't have to clone out branches as the cloning is a bit evident. The composition is the strongest aspect of this photo imo. devil

Registered on October 18, 2006, 644 Posts, 4801 Comments