Life Cycle 1

Bald Eagle delivering a spotted sea trout breakfast.
Shot at an effective focal length of 825mm using a Nikon 200-400mm lens with a 1.7x extender on a camera with a 1.5x crop sensor. Very little post processing was done with only minor adjustments made to the highlights and shadows along with a bit of localized sharpening and cropping to remove distractions.
This was captured after spending 6 consecutive weekends in the hot Florida sun trying to capture some usable images of a pair of eagles raising two eaglets. For me finding this nest was a thrilling discovery since prior to this time I had never even seen a bald eagle in the wild.
Overall I spent most of my free time over a 3 month period observing and documenting the growth of the 2 young eaglets and the habits of their parents. I learned a quite lot about eagle behavior and action photography over that period of time and as the saying goes… I wish I knew then what I know now.
By the time this was captured I had figured out that they were fairly consistent with their feeding times, although not as consistent with their path of approach to the nest. I chose this angle because it gave me the best chance of getting the parents in the shot with good light and without any branches partially obscuring them, like so many other shots I already had. On this morning the parents had twice approached from a different angle which had me contemplating a change in my setup. I decided to hang in there and stay put since I thought there would be at least one more feeding this morning. I’m so glad I decided not to move because this shot was the last feeding of the morning.
Looking back many opportunities for epic shots were missed for various reasons ranging from operator error and lack of knowledge all the way to inferior equipment.
When all was said and done I’m just happy to have been able to witness this spectacle of nature unfold before me and to get a few decent shots to share and to remember it by, while learning so much at the same time. Hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did taking them!