Posted November 28th, 2010

Chilkat Greeter

Last weekend I went down to Haines, Alaska with a couple of friends from the Photography Club, mainly to photograph eagles at the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. This area along the Chilkat River attracts the world’s largest congregation of eagles, which at this time of year come to feast on the dying salmon that fill the relatively warm open water after spawning. Though in past years I have seen much larger, tree-filling masses of the birds, there is never a shortage of subjects. If you look closely you will notice several eagles in the background of this image. The longest focal length I have in a digital era lens is 250mm so for this subject I experimented with a couple of old long telephotos that never were very good even on film cameras, a Tokina 500mm f/8 mirror lens and the Soligor 450mm f/8 that I used to take this picture. This lens, which I bought many years ago for less than a hundred dollars, was highly susceptible to flare and produced very poor contrast on film; it is no surprise that these problems are exacerbated by the digital medium. But I was pleasantly surprised that this cheap glass proved sharp enough to satisfy the demands of the digital sensor, at least when I managed to achieve accurate focus (Oh, for a good old split image / microprism focusing screen!), and its bokeh is in a class apart from the mirror lens. And nowadays there is Photoshop. With some heavy tweaking in software to correct the Soligor’s deficiencies, most of the exposures I made with it were salvageable and some are quite satisfying. Though I got many images of eagles filling much of the frame, some of my favourites were more distant habitat shots including this one looking out across the river channel.
Pentax K10D, Soligor 450mm f/8 Preset @ f/16, 1/6 sec