Wednesday, January 20, 2010

More Raptors

We traveled to the Conowingo Power generation dam again last weekend to view and photograph Bald Eagles and Great Blue Herons.  The weather cooperated well on Friday.  We had bright skies for most of the day with the warmest weather we have experienced in months.  The Bald Eagles were not actively fishing as the dam was not being used to generate power on Friday, but we had a number of Bald Eagles sitting in the trees and doing "flyovers".  A short hike down the nature trail along the Susquehanna yielded some "sitters". 

This tree had two adults and three immatures sitting in it when I first observed them   They were right over the trail at the river's edge. A group of hikers came by and the immatures flew and this adult just continued to give everyone the "eagle eye".  He stayed on that branch for hours with a number of folks walking down the trail.








Standing at the Boat Ramp watching eagles "playing" in the distance also paid off with shots of "immies" scrapping and adult flyovers.  We stopped counting at 70 Bald Eagles when we could no longer be sure that we were counting unique eagles.




I am still working on technique for flying eagles to get crisper images. Mark Picard has been offering advise and we will be trying some new techniques this weekend.  I have tried to stay faster than 1/1000 shutter speed using aperture priority and ISO float to keep there.  However, I have also been using AF 51 point tracking and release + focus as priority for the AFC tracking.  I will be trying AF 9 and release priority this weekend and will try to control to 1/1250 or faster for shutter speed.

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