Eagle

I had an idea tonight for some product pictures tonight that involved going to the beach. As soon as we got to the beach though, I got side tracked by a pair of eagles and that was that. So tonight's photo is simply of an eagle being an eagle and flying around and basically looking amazing.

I shot using Av mode. The eagle was constantly moving through different light zones, and I wanted to have correct exposure no matter where it was. Av mode calculates the shutter speed for you, and so you can quickly change exposure zones without missing the shot. The draw back is obviously lack of control over the shutter, but there's Tv mode for that.

I had my aperture at f5.6 (as open as it would go at 300mm) and my ISO at 800. This allowed me the range of 1/320-1/120 depending on where I was shooting. My Ev compensation was set to +1, so that the camera would over expose by one stop. This gave the shadows a raise, and ensured that I was getting the details in the eagle.

I found the best strategy for  shooting moving birds is to turn on auto focus and constantly have the bird in the frame. I keep both eyes open, so if the bird gets out of the frame, I can still see what's it's doing and quickly reframe.

Other than that, it's pretty much luck to get the best shots! Animals are unpredictable, and so you just snap away at anything that looks cool. You can tell a bit when they're about to swoop or fly off a perch, so you have to stay on your toes for that sort of thing.

With the image I got, I did all my editing in Lr. First, I pulled the whites and vibrance. Then I raised the black point on the tone curve panel, and added some blue to the shadows. At this point I decided I liked it in b/w, so I converted it to that. I raised the luminosity of yellow a bit for the conversion. To finalize it, I added a strong vignette, because I really like vignettes.

See you tomorrow!