Dead Goose, Happy Eagle
Although British Columbia's Khutzeymateen Inlet is best known for its grizzly bears (for good reason), the inlet has a lot of other interesting wildlife. That list includes wolves, harbor seals, otters, mink, a plethora of songbirds, waterfowl, and of course, some pretty spectacular birds of prey - such as Sharp-shinned and Coopers Hawks and Harriers. And, there's always a Bald Eagle or two hanging around!
We noticed this Bald Eagle on the shoreline near where our 71' sailboat (our "floating basecamp") was anchored. Other eagles were in the area and were swooping down to harrass this one, which we thought likely signified that THIS eagle was "sitting" on something worthwhile. Turns out we were right - this fellow was on a freshly killed Canada Goose. A tiny bit of its flesh and some of its downy feathers are visible in this shot. The orange/brown vegetation covering the rock is common along shorelines on the west coast and is of the genus
Fucus.
Subject: Bald Eagle (
Haliaeetus leucocephalus) feasting on hapless Canada Goose
Location: Khutzeymateen Inlet, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8 VR - hand-held from floating zodiac. VR on and in "Normal" mode.
Exposure: 1/400s @ f9; ISO 640. -1.67 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Very minor - this is about 95% of full-framed image
As always, way more info about this image (including more image capture and post processing details) is available for this image on my website, in this case right here:
http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/birds/birdsofprey/detail_5.html.
Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!
Cheers...
Brad
Comments
10 commentsJim - you say: "I was surprised to see you used -1.67 compensation in such a dark scene but I assume this was to deal with the 'white's' on the eagle"
Well...yes...and no. This was a very dark scene overall - far darker than neutral gray (almost two stops darker). So even if this was an immature eagle with a dark head, I would have exposed the scene this way. I use multi-segment metering (Matrix for Nikon folks, Evaluative in Canon-speak) - these systems always try to produce a scene of neutral gray (in "histogram terms" this means they're trying to force the exposure to the center of the histogram). With a dark scene like this the camera would try to force it to neutral gray, resulting in an over-exposure. So the whole scene would "brighten up" (and not look like what I saw in the field) AND the whites on the eagle would have blown out. So...I was thinking about saving those highlights, but I would have under-exposed this scene even if it didn't have any whites in it.
Cheers...
Brad
Balan Vinod
Living in Tucson, AZ I am usually dealing with too much harsh light so it was interesting to read about your approach to handling a dark scene. Thanks for the follow up reply.
Jim