Wedge Tailed Eagle
This wedge tailed eagle was taken at the Ballarat Wildlife Park.
This wedge tailed eagle was taken at the Ballarat Wildlife Park.
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Nov, 2013Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
The photo was taken at the Ballarat Wildlife Park, in Victoria, Australia.Time
The photo was taken at 10:06am on a frosty late winters morning.Lighting
Even though the sun was up the area where the eagle was located was very sheltered and even the background was quite dark. He was too far away for flash to work so rather than taking the photo at 100ISO, I increased it to 250 and got the exposure time to 1/250sec.Equipment
The photo was taken with my old Canon 10D and a rather cheap 90-300mm lens. The enclosure in which the eagle could fly around in had holes in the fence for photographers to put their lenses through and as such you could use a tripod or anything else, so it was taken hand held.Inspiration
The eagle was just sat there and I thought it would make a great shot. Using a low depth of field f/5.6 I was able to get him in focus and completely blur the background.Editing
I cropped the photo quite heavily, because even though I had the lens fully extended to 300mm, he was so far away that he only filled about half the height of the photo.In my camera bag
I usually only have my current camera (now a Canon 10D), a zoom lens (used to be 28-90mm & 90-300, but now 18-200mm and a wide angle 10-20mm). I usually have a 25mm extender just in case I want to take some macro shots as well.Feedback
Patience is probably the best advice when taking shots like this. A small amount of luck as well. I have been back many times and never found any of the eagles just sitting on a branch. They are nearly always flying around or hopping around on the ground. Try and get the exposure time as quick as possible, even if it means upping the ISO a bit. Under ISO400, won't produce too much noise on a modern camera.
