Today I spent time in Grand Rivers, Ky photographing a new, at least to me, Eagles nest Josh Morgan, a fellow member of the photography club showed me. This is my second year of photographing Eagles in the Land Between The Lakes Region and the second nest I’ve photographed. You can’t see a whole lot of the eagle or nest in this shot of my camera setup, but I wanted to use my iPhone photo of the day challenge to talk a little bit about my take on shooting eagle pictures.
For me, and it’s different for other people, I like to setup and frame the eagles in a way where I can catch them entering and leaving the nest. This means leaving a bit more framing to allow for movement of the bird. Other key’s to success for me are, high shutter speed, wide open f/stop (the extra depth of field at 300mm doesn’t help a lot, where the shutter speed does), a good sturdy tripod and a whole lot of patience. Also, it’s good to study the birds so you can anticipate when they are going to take flight.
Photo shot with my iPhone 5s and processed in Photoshop CS6 as a RAW file.