Wildlife Gallery: Bald Eagles of Homer AK

Back in the spring of 2006 I had the opportunity to go to Homer Alaska and photograph the bald eagles. Jean Keene, known as the Eagle Lady, had been feeding eagles from her home on the Homer Spit since about 1977. She continued to feed them every winter until she passed away in 2009 at the age of 85. These winter feedings attracted a large number of eagles to a relatively easy to reach location that offered wonderful backgrounds to photograph the eagles in.

The following photographs were all taken on my sole visit to the area. Most of these images were shot with a Canon 20D and Canon 500mm F4 L IS lens.

Capturing motion blur in the wings while still keeping the head and body sharply focused takes a combination of techniques. To get the blur in the wings, you have to have a slow enough shutter speed to capture it. The exact shutter speed will depend on how fast the eagle is flapping its wings. In order to keep the rest of the eagle in sharp focus, you have to smoothly pan your camera at the same speed and in sync with it. Combining all of that with a fast and elusive subject makes it hard to get in flight photos.

Life is much easier if they are doing a lot of low level soaring for you. You don’t have to worry so much about keeping your shutter speed down and you can concentrate on keeping your panning action smooth and in sync with them.

When they are not soaring and capturing motion blur in the wings is a little too difficult for the conditions or your skill level (my keep rate drops drastically when I try and get motion blur in the wings), you can always keep your shutter speed up and freeze the action.

One of the biggest challenges of photographing bald eagles is getting the exposure correct. In strong lighting it is very easy to over expose the white head and tail feathers. You need to expose to preserve the highlights and pull the shadow details out in post processing. Using a lower ISO setting will help in this regard as you will naturally get a wider dynamic range at lower ISO settings.

Capturing photos of eagles fishing can be really challenging as you need a faster shutter speed to freeze the action (they can be moving in all different directions in fractions of a second) and a larger aperture to insure you have enough depth of field to keep everything in focus. This means you need a higher ISO and you lose that extra dynamic range to expose everything correctly. But the action you can capture makes up for any technical issues the images might have.