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an almost mature Bald Eagle
at Big Beef Creek on the Hood Canal
Puget Sound, Washington©2008 Ed BookHelp, my lens is too long and the bird is too close. I didn't have time to take the 1.4X teleconverter off the 500mm lens for this guy. Although this bird looks like a mature, it was still replacing it's immature and ragged feathers. An adult bald eagle wouldn't have approached as close as this guy did, demonstrating a foolish carelessness that may entail a steep cost if it doesn't become much more wary of largest adversary, man. Canon D1s Mk II with 500mm f/4 'L' Image Stabilized lens and Canon 1.4X teleconverter, ISO 400, 1000sec exposure @ f/6.3 (image cropped to about 1/3 full framePeace Tags: -print available-, animals, bird, clouds, kitsap peninsula, puget sound, sky, wa
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immature Bald Eagle (Aquila Haliaeetus leucocephalus) practices aerial acrobatics©2008 Ed BookToday low tide on the Hood Canal was a minus 2.5 so I went down with my long lens to see what I could record of the Bald Eagles that surely would be feeding on trapped fish as the outgoing tide isolated them in the shallows. I was in luck with a bright day (fast shutter speeds with fairly low ISO) and a contingent of at least a dozen eagles. Most of them were immature with about half of their fledgling feathers replaced with adult plumage. Still displaying adolescent, foolish, clumsy, behavior and flying ineptitude, they're learning though and don't pass by any opportunities for practice. There were a few of us there burning in the sun but anxious to record anything we were fortunate to find. I chatted with a new friend and watched patiently as the eagles sat forever and then launched when we weren't ready playing us. Photographing eagles isn't easy with the long lens (Canon 500mm f/4 'L' Image Stabilized with 1.4X teleconverter giving an effective focal length of 700mm on the full size sensor Canon EOS 1Ds MkII camera). Making photographs consisted of standing with hands on the gimbaled-tripod-mounted camera ready to react and hoping that I could follow the bird's motion. If the focus point shifted off the bird, the lens would quickly shift focus to infinity and the bird would become a blur if even visible. I would have to get the blur lined up with the focusing square to again bring the bird into focus all the while the bird was moving. Concentration was the key and exhausting after a couple hours. I managed to record about 12GB of images and am importing them into Photoshop Lightroom as I type. Working in my office today with two computers, four monitors, ten hard drives all pumping out heat on this probably one of the hottest days of the year. If there's interest, I'll post more from today. Peace Tags: -print available-, animals, bird, blue, kitsap peninsula, puget sound, sky, wa
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"skunked" = no luck, no dice, nada, came home empty handed, zilch, zero (eagles 9 - Ed 0)After an excellent breakfast with Cookie at Barbies on the dock at Seabeck, I lolligagged about at Big Beef Creek a while hoping for some Bald Eagle photo ops... 500mm image stabilized lens with 1.4 teleconverter on a Canon EOS D1s MkII (full frame sensor) and a few eagles but at distance, I didn't produce anything I could use ...except as bad examples here at full resolution - they were 'eagledots' but cropped very tightly here so you could see that there was a bird in the image. Today was dark from heavy overcast and low clouds which had me pump ISO up to 640 (and sometimes ISO 1000) and still couldn't get exposure duration shorter than 1/250 to 1/320 sec. Those speeds may seem fast but considering that the focal length is 720mm, not nearly fast enough to prevent blur - the image stabilization helped some though... 'had it on the 'pan' mode so it only stabilized in one dimension (up/down) so it wouldn't try to correct for panning. This image was (really really terribly) terrible and in it somewhere there was an eagle carrying something tangled in seaweed. It may look like I did 'artsy' stuff with it but the streaks were motion of the background and the overall effect only optimizing for brightness, contrast, noise reduction and some sharpening... any other camera would have produced mush... but this camera was able to give mush with some hints of lumps. (this was while I had the camera in aperture priority mode and the exposure was way too slow at 1/80sec. at ISO 1000 and at f/14 (yeah, an opps on my settings, I should have been at f/5.6 and that would have given me an almost decent shutter speed... but in the moment of panning and trying to find the bird in the viewfinder, I adjusted without thinking and Murphy's law came into effect...) ©2008 Ed Bookmore images of these guys ( here )'but made a couple new friends while waiting for birdsPeace Tags: bird, kitsap peninsula, puget sound, wa
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working on something different a little while ' call it refreshing the palette. I've been optimizing and printing images for my 'featured artist' show next month at the Silverdale Fine Arts gallery ... all new prints and in one theme... I'm quite busy getting everything ready... more about it soon. 
Hood Canal and the Olympic Mountains, Washington©2006 Ed BookI made this image about a mile from our home on Nika Trail a couple years ago and just picked it at random to optimize before checking back into my project. (no, the theme of the collection of images isn't landscape) I'll bet some who keep up with what I post could guess... a subject that's gotten good reviews herebouts on LJ. Peace Tags: -print available-, kitsap peninsula, landscape, mountains, olympic mountains, puget sound, sky, sunset, wa, waterflow
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freshwater from Big Beef Creek freezing in Hood Canal tidewater©2007 Ed BookPeace Tags: forest, high key, kitsap peninsula, landscape, puget sound, river, snow, trees, wa, white, winter
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Big Beef Creek at the Hood Canal tidewater©2007 Ed Bookfresh snow at sealevel Peace Tags: forest, high key, kitsap peninsula, landscape, puget sound, river, snow, trees, wa, white, winter
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Kitsap Peninsula - Puget Sound lowlands (bog along Sesame St up the road from Nika Trail©2007 Ed BookContrary to some opinions that I may have generated with my last post of some peaks in the Olympic Mountains from our home here on Nika Trail... Although we have views of the mountains like that view, we're not in the mountains but in the Puget Sound lowlands and our home is at about 350 ft above sea level. The Olympic mountains rise to about 5700' along the Hood Canal (fjord) that separates our Kitsap Peninsula from the Olympic Peninsula and the peaks are about 20 miles away. Peace Tags: -print available-, forest, kitsap peninsula, landscape, nika trail, puget sound, snow, trees, wa, white, winter
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Christmas Eve morning 2007 moonset
over Mt Constance in the Olympic Mountains
from our home on Nika Trail on the Kitsap Peninsula in Puget Sound©2007 Ed BookPeace Tags: -print available-, alpenglo, blue, clouds, landscape, moon, mountains, olympic mountains, pink, puget sound, sky, snow, wa, winter
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 ©2007 Ed Book I once served in the Navy... so many years ago that it seems it was a different lifetime or dream recalled. Between a year+ of electronics schools and another year+ of nuclear propulsion schools I spent a few months here and there aboard a few ships working as an Electronics Technician. One of the jobs given to the newbies was go out on the yardarms to repair antenna that lived in that rare air out there. I had a problem with it though. Although I loved getting high (physically), until that point in time, I had an intense fear of heights. Climbing the stairs of a fire tower, after a few stories, my feet would refuse to allow me to lift them to the next stair-tread, my fingers would grip the handrail so tightly that they would cramp. I could only loosen their grip if I was backing down. When given the chore to go aloft, I told of my fear and was told to take my time and use multiple safety lines and just do it. I was always game for trying... I put on three sets of safety lines and went aloft... I spent hours up there on the mast trying to get the courage to go out on the yardarm where the antenna I was to repair snickered at me. I couldn't do it and climbed down. My chief was understanding and said I could try again the next morning... I did, and again I failed but at least I enjoyed the view and the welcome breeze in the June heat. The third day, I tried again and inch at a time I conquered that yardarm. I got out there by not looking down. Luckily the ship didn't move and the wind didn't blow the man down. After the work was complete, I looked down... no big deal, I was so high on my accomplishment and the fact that I was so physically high that the ground appeared as if I was in a low flying airplane. I should mention that the ship I was on was the aircraft carrier USS America in the shipyard in Portsmouth, VA and the yardarm I had navigated was 250 feet up. The following few days the shipyard put up scaffolding to the top of the mast so it could be painted and the job would have been much easier... My chief had been both messing with me and giving me confidence. My division was the owner of the mast and all the electronic equipment - communications and radar antenna and we had to paint it all too. Almost everyone in my division refused to do the high work and I volunteered. I spent the summer aloft in the cool breeze with a view and a few friends... Our chief was afraid to go aloft himself to check on us so when the job was finished, we lingered a few more weeks till they took down the scaffolding... When the scaffolding was in place I didn't feel the need for a safety line let alone the three that I started with. Remind me sometime to tell of the time we dropped a five gallon bucket of redlead paint onto the flight deck from up there... and what we painted on the top of the TACAN raydome at the top of the mast that only the helo pilots could read. and what we left up there as a pennant on the lightning rod... bad boy after that, I had no problems with heights till I fell forty feet while rock climbing. Peace Tags: -print available-, alpenglo, nautical, puget sound, wa, whidbey island
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edbook's journal
