It's rant time .... I get so tired of certain people claiming that the only way certain photos can be made is with high tech wunderkameras. That is such a crock ... Here's Herb talking about bald eagles. One of the greatest bald eagle photographers I know of, John Pezzenti, has been photographing bald eagles for more than 25 years, and much of that time was before the advent of auto focus cameras, fast, long lenses, good quality fast film (even now he uses a "slow" slide film). How did he become successful. Practice. Studying the habits of the birds. Hard work and diligent effort. A lot of his work was done with relatively short focal length lenses. He learned how to get close to some nesting pairs. He learned to anticipate their flight patterns. He studied the birds and their flight habits.
It seems that for the most part photographers of today have forgotten that these qualities - even with high tech gear - will always yield the best photographs. Pezzenti would practice focusing for hours at a time. In a magazine article a few years ago he said: "I did a lot of this in the pre-autofocus days. I used to practice focusing manually on fast-moving animals by focusing on my dogs as they ran around, and it paid off. In terms of shutter speed, I prefer at least 1/1000 sec. when photographing eagles in flight, but I'll go down as low as 1/250 sec. and pan." Shel > [Original Message] > From: Herb Chong > seeing a set of flying bald eagles mating and not being able to capture that > except as out of focus blurs while my companion with his D70 gets sharp > captures was the final straw, especially when my camera locked up writing > its buffer. the birds were too close for effective manual focus as they were > falling vertically and changing their distance to me as they fell.
