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1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n I’ve always enjoyed this shot from my archives but I’ve never posted it or done anything else with it because of a self-inflicted flaw. I’m sure that flaw is immediately obvious to most viewers but I’ll explain further a little later in this post.<\/p>\n When the shutter fired the eagle had just snagged a fish from the very shallow water (only 3 or 4″ deep) at Farmington Bay WMA in winter. I cropped the image as I did to include the column of dirty water lifted from the bottom of the pond at lower left as the eagle pulled the carp out of the water. For some reason I’m a little intrigued by the fact that the shape of the dirty water column strongly resembles the curved shape of the fish, including dorsal fin. This is a difficult shot to time well while keeping focus locked on the eagle and I was just lucky that the bird tilted to its left slightly which provided some light and detail on its ventral surfaces.<\/p>\n Ok, now to the problem with the image.<\/p>\n My two worst bad habits as a bird photographer are:<\/p>\n Of the two the second one has ruined or compromised the most potentially good to excellent shots so I think of it as my worst bad habit involving photography.<\/p>\n And that’s what happened with this photo, it screams for clockwise rotation to level the image.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But when I rotate the image the 4.23\u00b0 necessary to level the image (I used the most dominant and longest band of ice in the upper background as a leveling guide) I lose significant canvas on all four sides so this is what I’m left with. I’ve cut off four primary feathers of the right wing and the composition is too long and narrow horizontally for my tastes – for this photo I prefer a 5×7 aspect ratio. Unacceptable on both counts!<\/p>\n The only solution of course is to add canvas up top to the original photo and then<\/em> rotate it to level.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n After adding canvas up top and rotating the image to level I think the photo looks pretty darn good considering the less than ideal lighting conditions but all of what you see here isn’t what I saw in my viewfinder. In my view disclosing the added canvas to my viewers mitigates both my error and my manipulation of the photo to some degree but not completely. It would have been far better to have had my lens level in the first place. After all, how much effort would that take!<\/p>\n I’ve been photographing birds for 12 years now and I continue to make this rookie mistake more often than I should. I’m 72 years old now but give me another decade or two and maybe I’ll get it right in camera.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note to any pixel peepers out there: <\/em><\/p>\n Some may have spotted an apparent zone of disparate bokeh in the background immediately surrounding the six longest primary feathers of the right wing that might appear to be a processing artifact. It isn’t. The only processing I’ve done to all 3 versions of the photo is crop, sharpen globally, rotate, add canvas above the right wing and increase exposure globally very slightly. That wingtip in the RAW file looks the same as it does in these jpegs. Occasionally that just happens…<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Plus my worst bad habit as a photographer (I have other bad habits but most of them don’t involve photography).<\/p>\n\n
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