Posted December 2nd, 2012

In Flight

I recently traveled to Haines, Alaska along with a few friends from the Whitehorse Photography Club to photograph the eagles that congregate there for a late salmon run on the Chilkat River. The club assigns a monthly theme for members to shoot and then show our best results at the next meeting and the theme for our December meeting is "in flight", so catching the birds airborne was a major focus of this outing. That is a challenge at any time but the flight patterns of the eagles here tend to be erratic and unpredictable and the low light at this time of year makes continuous autofocus more unreliable, especially with a slow lens. My most successful shots were fairly distant and often contained distracting elements elsewhere in the frame so most required heavy cropping and that also brought out the quality limitations resulting from relatively high ISO. Massaging the images in software, including liberal use of Noise Ninja and Photokit Sharpener plugins in Photoshop, yielded considerable improvement but I don't expect to be able to produce any satisfactory large prints from these photos. Still, some like this one are satisfying to view on-screen.
Pentax K-5, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 1/1500sec @ f/8, ISO 800