After a long hiatus, here's a new photo.  Parenthood and work have been keeping me busy, and photography kind of fell by the wayside.  But, here I am.

The family and I were looking for a Saturday adventure, and an eagle-spotting trip sounded like just the ticket.  The American Bald Eagle comes to roost along the Mississippi River in the winter, and they can often be found in places where the ice is thin enough to allow them to fish.  Although Chicago is on the opposite side of the state, it's a deceptively short drive (about 2 1/2 hours). 

I'd heard that the eagles can be skittish and temperamental, but finding them wasn't nearly as hard as I expected.  This has been a very cold winter, which limits the places where waterways haven't frozen-over completely.  Locks and dams have a tendency to break-up the ice, so that was a good place to start.  Even better, the Army Corp of Engineers operates a number of lock along the Mississippi, and happened to have on near Delavan Iowa.  The folks at the corps were very helpful and even had a scope trained on a nearby perch.  The corps even had an area of the river fenced-off for eagles.  Since the eagles know they are safe in that location, I think they tend to be less concerned with having people around.  I was able to get within 100 yards without eliciting much reaction at all.  In fact, this is one of the few eagles who ever seemed to look at me.

I used my Sigma 170-500mm lens.  The lens is a beast -- 3 pounds and a foot long -- and I rarely find occasion to use it.  I must say, I am very pleased with how the lens performed today.  The lens has a reputation for being slow to auto-focus and sometimes "hunting" hopelessly, but this wasn't a problem for me today.  It did a good job focusing on perched birds, getting it right about 90% of the time on it's first attempt.  In-flight shots proved a little trickier to focus, but the lens still did very well.  I think it was aided in part by the AI servo focusing on my camera (a Canon 10D).  I'd say I got about 75% success rate focusing on in-flight birds.  The lens also has a reputation for being a bit too "soft" as you approach 500mm.  I keep this in mind and rarely push beyond 450mm.  The lens did great at that level, and shots about 500mm were still pretty good.

This isn't really the best work I could have done, but I'm happy enough with it given the conditions.  First of all, it was f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g cold.  Just to get the camera to work, I had to keep warming batteries in my pants pocket.  There wasn't much sun, so the eagles weren't too interested in flying or moving around and my options to finding a "decisive moment" for a photo were limited.  The lack of light also made it difficult to get a good exposure of the birds and the environment. 

In the end, I decided to publish a fairly archetypical image that we've all seen before -- a solitary eagle, watching you, from a lofty perch. And because of the poor light, getting a good final image took a fair amount of work in Photoshop.  Nonetheless, I'm pretty happy with my work, especially when you consider the family time I was able to enjoy in the process.