This beautiful Bald Eagle gave me a nice look flying in front of a lovely mountain background. Missing a few feathers from that right wing probably from battles with other eagles over fish, or from hitting branches as they land in heavily branched woods. Saw that happen many times as they landed in trees above the river. Still amazingly beautiful, majestic birds.
The eagle looks good with lots of detail in the head region and wings. One of your hallmarks is that you have plenty of real estate around the subject. Nice comp and I like your image as presented. A question for you: Do you use Auto White Balance and how much tweaking of white balance you do when editing your RAW files? Thank you…Jim
Hi Jim:
Thanks for your comment on the image. To answer your question, I rarely use Auto White Balance. Most of the time I use either Sunny or Cloudy white balance options on my cameras. I find that Auto White Balance tends to create more variation for images, even though the lighting really didn’t change. Backgrounds affect it, etc. So in general, if the conditions are sunny or mostly sunny I go with sunny. Otherwise I use cloudy. I don’t generally tweak white balance much. If needed, I can correct one image from a sequence then apply that adjustment to an entire sequence since the white balance didn’t vary using a predefined white balance.
Hi @Dave_Douglass Thanks for giving it a go to clone in the missing feathers. While some may prefer that, I would never clone these feathers in. Why? For me photography is about 90% about the experience of being there and 10% about getting a few nice images. This experience was about seeing hundreds of bald eagles at a time, fighting, flying, landing, eating and overall, just being eagles. Watching them interact in sometimes pretty violent ways created some lasting memories and in this case an image to help cement that memory. Nature isn’t perfect, our subjects are not perfect and for me on this image showing the scars of battle was an integral part of the experience, the image and the story.
I get that. I’ve been guilty of “cleaning up” some of my photo subjects. I may start thinking about working magic on the photos. The last thing I can think of that I did was to remove a rather large, and ugly tumor(?) from beneath the beak of an otherwise magnificent looking ferruginous hawk. Hmmm…
Great story to go with a really beautiful image, Keith. I find that the missing feather tells a great story for everyone that sees this image regardless of whether they have read your intro or not. Life is not perfect and this points that out in detail.
Great wing position, lovely diffused light and terrific eye contact. Now that I’m mostly into landscape photography, one of the first things I do is border patrol. It’s just a habit. One very small thing that pulls my eye ever so slightly is the tree intruding into the frame in the LLC along the left side of the frame. It’s very small and most may not even notice it but it’s lighter than the surrounding trees and just grabs my eye. As always, beautiful image, Keith.
You managed to show the atmosphere (or what I suspect it must have been) very well in this image. The majestic bird, the mountainous surroundings and the bird that has already seen something in its life. Love it! Hans
