I had the good fortune to link up with a biologist from BC hydro last year, and she's been a real champ about taking me out on the tailraces whenever I call and beg!
Well, today was a total wash-out, to stay the least. There must have been 30+ eagles around, but much to my dismay, they didn't stay in place, afraid to fly due to the wet weather as I had hoped. Rebecca(said biologist) has come to the conclusion that they are just scared of black ford trucks, so next time we will take her white company truck and see if that makes any difference! (I'm not holding my breath)
Determined to get something on the card today, we headed east following the sunshine-pretty easy in the Peace. It was looking good back towards the Halfway River, and we've seen a pair of balds in a nest there most times that we come through the area. Today was no exception. The only difference was that the babies-if you can call them that at this stage!-were very restless and the parents were initially nowhere to be found.
I've come to a few conclusions recently about super-tele lenses, the most important being that tele-converters(unless you are on a tripod) are more of a detriment than an aid. The combination of losing 1.5-2 stops of light, along with the dis-advantage of added camera shake multiplied by the converter length just doesn't make the whole operation worthwhile. I shot a friend in a riverboat the other day. He was doing 25-30kn, + current, in low light, and the 600 on my ancient 1DS threw out some truly stellar shots.
Putting the 1.4x on the 600 and slapping the whole affair on the 1DIII should have produced some spectacular results, but this was not the case. We started flirting with too slow of a shutter speed, the ISO came up, and it just wasn't what I was looking for. It would probably be a good topic for discussion here on the blog, but unfortunately I deleted all the garbage and now have nothing for said discussion.
So, on to the eagles. Us flatlanders find them so fascinating, I always laugh when someone who has grown up with them chastises us about our affinity for such a regal bird. The answer is simple-we're tired of looking at Ravens!!
Todays lesson-manual exposure!! around 200 clicks to produce the 3 or 4 decent shots you see here.
Ive alway been an advocate of spot metering, but against a bright sky, even that may not be enough to keep the shadows in these dark bird exposed. 1-1.5 stops overexposed was putting some pretty good shots on the card-too bad it took me most of the day to figure it out!
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