Photographing Winter Migration Of Bald Eagles 174
We’re finally starting to see the Eagles show up and spotting the Hawks up in the trees. Photographing the bald eagles during their migration to the Willamette Valley is a rewarding hobby. They are all over the valley from February to mid-march. Photographing the birds with a telephoto lens used for sports and wildlife is a constructive way to isolate the image’s subject even when at a great distance.
The Eagles move in there during late January. They have a big, bold black body and a bright white cap of the head. I see a lot of mature eagles and a bunch of juveniles. I know the jacks are a juvenile Eagle. They’re big and pretty bulky in size, but they have a brown textured feather color. Not black. They’re not complete. Is it like a golden eagle or a juvenile bald eagle that hasn’t grown its white head feathers yet?
In Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, bald eagles were nearly extirpated. However, they have made a remarkable species recovery across the northwest range during the last 30 years.
Photographing Winter Migration Of Bald Eagles
For doing bird photography, you need an enormous scope. They’re real distant, so one has to get real close. You have to have an incredible telephoto lens to get up on that stuff. A lot of the birdwatchers had big binoculars; they have big bird-watching scopes. Generally, the Swarovski Optik and Vortex Optics or the LEUPOLD Binoculars that hunters would use typically. Once you put it on a tripod system, it’s stable, you can zoom like a telescope with one eye, and you can scout in, zoom right up into a bird or an animal that you’re watching. Leica Binocular
One of the adages is “the name of the game is fill the frame.” it is an idea where if you’re taking a picture of something, have that something be most of the space that occupies the frame. I’ve taken many of these where your real far away because you can’t get that close to wildlife. Then you have a picture of a bird or a coyote, and it takes the visual space of a fingernail at arm’s length. In the French film, there is an idea called Mise-en-scène. It’s what’s on screen. I think that’s a big part of the emotional sensation that you get from what’s visualized on the screen.
I was working with an 80 to 400mm Nikon lens, which worked great for many wildlife photos.
To get close on those specimens of a bird that’s maybe six inches high, for a deer or an elk, you’re looking at 100 yards, and you zoom in, the animal will stand eight and a half feet, you’re viewing in That circle. However, a bird is maybe 12 inches to 24 inches. The bird’s small size means that you have to get close to the subject and use a solid telephoto to fill the frame of the photo with the eagle. Canon U.S.A., Inc. | EF 400mm f/5.6L USM
I often see these big zoom lenses used in sports photography and wildlife photography.
I had to have such a fast zoom lens to get those images; many people working on types of bird photos work between 400 millimeters and 600 millimeters. Sometimes the project even requires that they put a doubler on that. So that they have that 2x magnification that they can clip onto a 400-millimeter lens, now they’ve got an 800-millimeter lens, it cuts down a bunch of the light that you get to collect. Let’s say if you’re at f4. You put on this 2x converter. Now you’re all of a sudden at F8 when you shoot. It makes it a lot slower. It does add a lot of magnification and zoom. It cuts down on the amount of light you’d need to capture to represent an 800-millimeter image that is magnified.
If you look at a dedicated Nikon 600 millimeter lens, it looks like a telescope that needs its tripod to keep support. I don’t even think it’s something you can attach to the front of the camera and go about your business with the 300 millimeters. You can pretty well do that fixed 300 f2.8 lenses for Canon or Nikon. They’re big. They look like a tank on the front of that camera. It can handle it pretty well. You can move around and take pictures with it for a lot of wildlife stuff. People use a 300-millimeter lens and a 2x converter. So they can photograph up to 600mm zone.
Photographing the bald eagles during their migration to the Willamette Valley is a rewarding hobby. They are all over the valley from February to mid-march. Photographing the birds with a telephoto lens used for sports and wildlife is a constructive way to isolate the image’s subject even when at a great distance.
Photographing Winter Migration Of Bald Eagles
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