The Majestic Bald Eagle.

I love many different types of photography, but I seem to really have an addiction for eagle photography.  Raptors fascinate me, but eagles are what I spend more time chasing and trying to photograph more than any other bird. The Bald Eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, our national bird, is the only eagle unique to North America. I am sure being our national symbol has had a lot of influence in my feelings, but having watched them for so many hours has only deepened my fascination of them. During the winter you can find me prowling the banks of the Mississippi River near my home to find the many eagles that migrate down from the north to find the open waters of the river to feed. Occasionally I get lucky and get a decent photo every once in a while. There does not seem to be nearly as many eagles this year as there have been in he past, but there are still enough around to keep me out there.

Bald Eagle Taking Flight

Bald Eagle riding an ice floe down the Mississippi River

Immature Bald Eagle sitting on the ice

 Alton Grain Elevator reflected in the water as an Bald Eagle rides the ice

Bald Eagle watches the surroundings from a high perch

Portrait of a captive Bald Eagle

The Bald Eagle

Although I am not looking forward to winter due to the cold, damp, and generally miserable gray skies of the midwestern weather patterns, it does bring the return of he Bald Eagles. Since I am geographically located very close to the Mississippi River and the lock and dam in Alton, IL., this creates a a great place to view and photograph a good concentration of eagles. As the eagles move down south to avoid the frozen north, they congregate along the river. Eagles main diet are fish, and they need open water to feed.

Bad Eagle Taking flight

Although you can find eagles all up and down the Mississippi River during the winter months, the greatest concentrations of them can be found at the numerous lock and dams along the river. The reason for this is that even when the weather is extremely cold and the river freezes over, the waters around the locks are still open. As the water comes through the dam, many fish are stunned or killed. The eagles feed on these easy pickings. This makes for superb bird watching and photographing these beautiful birds.

After catching a fish it was attacked by another eagle and forced to drop it

Eagles are very opportunistic and will routinely attack other eagles to steal the fish it has just caught. The photo above was captured at the Alton Lock and Dam, and the background is the lock wall where barges pass through. They will also catch and eat other birds or small animals out of necessity to eat.  

Taking a catch back to the perch to feed

In order to really get great photographs of these birds you are going to need a lot of focal length to reach them and fill the frame. Generally you will need about 400mm of focal length or greater to reach them as they fly out over the river. Occasionally I have gotten good shots with my 70-200mm and 1.4 extender attached when they fly close to where I am standing. Many times they will sit in the trees along the river which allows people to stop and get some closer views. 

Watching the river from the top of a tall tree

This eagle in the photograph above was sitting very high up in the tree watching the river. The angle shooting up from the ground was to steep in for a long telephoto lens. The tree was right next to the Clark Bridge in Alton, so I climbed the embankment and got up on the bridge ramp to get to nearly eye level to take this shot. After dodging some traffic, I was able to get some some great shots of this eagle. Although there was some good distance between us I was using a Canon 800mm lens that I had gotten on loan from Canon Professional Services to try out. That big lens made this an almost full frame capture.

Here is a great link if you want to learn more information about the Bald Eagle.

  http://www.baldeagleinfo.com/

Upcoming Exhibition and Lecture

This is going to be a short post today as I am traveling to Sycamore, Illinois, for an exhibition of my work and a nature photography lecture. On Saturday April 10th, I will have 15 pieces of my work on display and for sale at the Midwest Museum of Natural History. I will also be doing a nature photography lecture that afternoon starting at 2:00pm. My work will be on display in the museum for 1 month.

Here is the link to the museum   http://mmnh.org/

Sycamore , Illinois is the county seat of Dekalb County, and is west of Naperville IL. 

So if you know anyone in that area, let them know about the display and lecture.

Have A Great Weekend!

Scott

The Food Chain

As a nature and wildlife photographer I spend countless hours outside photographing and studying nature. Besides knowing all the technical stuff to make your camera work and give you a proper exposure, knowing your subject's behavior is extremely important. This allows you to know when something is going to happen that will make for a much more dramatic shot. When you first start photographing wildlife, you are happy to just get a nice exposure with sharp detail on your subject while it is in a static pose. Soon that is not good enough and you want some dramatic action. This is where knowing the animals behavior will allow you to anticipate the shot and capture some great action. The great thing about digital is you can take as many photos as possible and just delete what you do not need. In the films days this was a very expensive endeavor to make so many exposures to just get one or two of the peak action captures.

I have been fortunate to witness some amazing scenes while spending all those hours in the field. What has always fascinated me is the cycle of life, and where everything fits on the food chain. In fact one of my favorite quotes is "I am glad I am very high up on the food chain" My first foray into the food chain started in high school when I learned to scuba dive. Making my first dive in the ocean made it crystal clear that I was nowhere near the top of the food chain, and once I entered the water there were many things way bigger than me that could eat me.

My next sense of where I fit in on the food chain was backpacking in the back country of Yellowstone National Park and being in Grizzly Bear country. No bear spray back then. You wore a couple cow bells and talked out loud so they could hear you coming.

A good reminder of my place on the food chain occurred when I captured this 9-10 foot alligator chomping on a Horseshoe Crab. I had been squatting down at the water's edge in Ding Darling NWR to photograph some birds close by. Suddenly he came to the surface about 25-30 feet in front of me and started chomping away. Being the good photographer, I didn't flinch and kept shooting until my buffer was full and then shot some more. The gator finally spit out the crab and slid below the surface. I was eagerly checking my camera to see if I got any good shots. Suddenly several of those National Geographic shows popped into my head and started playing back. You know, the ones where the gators charge out of the water and grab the unsuspecting animal at the edge that was there to drink. They drag them under and start the death roll while ripping them apart. At that point I was back pedaling and got back up on the road ASAP.

It is not always pretty, and in reality it is often gory and bloody when you watch all creatures struggle to survive and pass along their genes to the next generation. But it is fascinating to see how they overcome much adversity to survive and thrive. But one mistake, or lax moment, can make them just another link on the food chain for a creature that is higher than them. I have come uncomfortably close a few times to being a link on that chain, but hopefully I will be around to document some of the action for a while longer.

Scott

A Week of 800mm Fun

For those of you that followed my blog last week, I spent a full week in Florida doing bird photography. I was really excited to get to use Canon's 800mm f5.6 L image stabilized lens for the entire week. As a registered professional photographer with Canon, they will loan you equipment to try and evaluate. So I emailed them and asked if it were possible to borrow an 800mm lens. This is Canon's largest lens that they currently manufacture. They have made several 1200mm lenses in the past but they are no longer producing them. I just checked the price of a Canon 800mm lens on B&H Camera in New York City. It was $10,900.00, so needless to say I will not be buying one any time soon. Now my good friend Mark McAmish has a Canon 500mm f4.0L IS lens that he lets me use on a regular basis. I fact it is usually on my camera more than his. If I add my 1.4 extender to that, I get 700mm of focal length at f5.6. So what is the advantage to the 800 lens? Well adding an extender slightly degrades image quality, and it slows down the electronics of the focus tracking system of the camera. Plus it is amazing how much that extra 100mm of focal length matters when you are trying to reach subjects that are pretty far out.

I had several people ask me how big and heavy the 800mm lens was, so I pressed my wife into service to snap a couple photos of me holding the lens attached to a camera body. This will give you an idea of the size of this lens. Since it is Canon's newest super telephoto lens, it has new lighter materials in it than their older 500 and 600mm lenses. So it is actually only 2 1/4 inches longer than the 500 and only slightly heavier. I have hand held a few shots with the 500 that came out good, but I did not even try with this lens. All shots were off a tripod and using a Wimberly Head.

Then I took a photo on the right of the 800 with it's lens hood attached standing

next to my 70-200mm zoom with it's lens hood attached. It really shows how big this lens is.

This is truly a special piece of equipment that has a specific purpose. It is mostly a nature and wildlife lens. The focal length is to long for most any type of sports photography. In fact I had trouble keeping the whole subject in the frame if they got close. How often as a photographer do you have to back up because you are to close? Hardly ever. Most of the time you are trying to get closer to fill the frame up in your viewfinder. But used properly, this lens can create some amazing photographs.

The eagle portrait on the right here was taken the day after the lens arrived before I headed to Florida. With the 800's powerful optics, I was able to isolate this shot through some branches while shooting almost straight up. When he glanced down at me I was able to make this shot. The color and detail brought out by this lens is awesome.

This shot below was taken on my last day in Florida at the Venice Rookery. This male Great Egret is bringing a stick back to the nest. He has his full breeding plumage and colors showing here. He was flying across the lake on his return to the nest. The out of focus background are trees across the lake. The 800 did a superb job of bring out the colors and detail in the birds plumage. He was pretty far out, but the 800 had no problem bringing him close enough to make a good photograph. 

       

Sadly I had to ship the lens back to Canon. I have started saving my change in hopes of some day being able to afford to buy this lens. But until then, Mark old buddy, when are we going out shooting again with your 500?

Where is Scott Today?

Greeting from Sunny, but not as warm as it should be, Southwest Florida. Currently staying in Ft. Myers for a couple days and then hopping over to Sanibel Island. 45 degrees this morning but it did hit 70 degrees this afternoon with the bright sunshine. Like just about everywhere else in the country, it has been much colder than normal down here all winter. Of course it seems warm to me coming from a much colder climate, as I wore shorts and a t-shirt today. The locals looked they were dressed for a polar expedition and they made numerous comments about my attire.

Besides the normal R&R of a vacation for my wife, I am taking photos from sun up to sun down with a special purpose. You see I was lucky enough to be able to borrow an 800mm f 5.6 L IS lens from Canon. If you are a professional photographer and use Canon professional grade camera bodies and lenses, you can register with Canon Professional Services. This affords professionals numerous great benefits, one of which is a loaner/evaluation program. They will loan you a piece of their professional grade equipment to try out and evaluate. Well I emailed them and asked if I could try an 800mm lens while I was on this trip. I never thought they would say yes to loaning me a $12,000.00 lens. But they did! So the big gun arrived on Thursday afternoon, and my buddy Mark McAmish and I took it for a test drive on Friday morning on eagles over in Alton. It is an amazing piece of equipment. I have one of the better eagle shots here from that morning but it is a small file size so it might not look great. Plus I am working off my old HP laptop that should be in the Smithsonian for being a the most durable piece of electronic equipment I have ever had. 

There is a pretty good learning curve with this lens and I struggled with tracking birds in flight. The lens is so powerful that I could not get on birds quick enough even with setting the focus limits. But practice makes perfect right? Well I will need a lot more practice. I was able to catch these really fast moving ducks though. I saw them pretty far out and was able to get locked on. I caught this male Ahinga sitting high in the brush with a nice blue sky background.

I spent my first morning shooting at the Venice Rookery. Located in Venice, Florida   Managed by the Venice Area Audubon Society, this small rookery is an amazing place to photograph several nesting species of birds. Here is a link to their website

http://www.veniceaudubon.org/
. If you make a trip to anywhere near this area and you like to photograph birds, this is a must stop location. The great thing is they are close enough you do not need a monster lens. (It is nice though) I was actually to close several times and the birds would be half out of the frame at times. 300-400mm of reach will do extremely well here.

This shot is a pair of young Great Blue Heron Chicks doing a little sparring while the parents were away from the nest. After the rookery shoot I stopped at an eagles nets in the North Ft.Myers area that I have shot in previous years. The eagles mate and nest sooner here and the chicks are probably only a couple weeks away from being able to leave the nest. I then went over to Cape Coral Florida and shot Burrowing Owls. It was getting cold by then and they stayed pretty far down in their burrows so nothing to brag about there. Just the fact that with an 800mm lens you can do head shot portraits on these tiny owls from 40 feet away.

Well gotta go clean the equipment and charge the camera batteries for tomorrow's shoot.

Take Care!