the frustrating part is that the day i saw the mating eagles, the guy next
to me, whom i have shot with a once and crossed paths with several times,
banged off a sequence of shots on his D70 that were all sharply focused and
kept up with the action. content-wise, most of them had something important
obscured, (a wing, head, or claw) that would have prevented them from being
used for publication, but there were one or two really good ones.
anyone can get a sharply focused image of a perched bird. that is why they
aren't worth much, and that is why pictures of birds in flight matter. a
picture of a hawk known to almost exclusively prey on field creatures, among
a flock of shorebirds scattering in fright doesn't wait around to be recued
and run for a second take. the hawk's wingspan would have covered about half
this frame http://users.bestweb.net/~hchong/Seasonal/image24.html, and those
were the birds it was after.
Herb....
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Reese" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: How Pentax Could Survive
Knowledge of your subject will put you in the right place at the right
time.
Having the right tools and knowing how to use them will get you the rest
of
the way. You have to consider the context of this discussion. We were
talking about shooting eagles in flight. I know from experience that it's
hard enough to keep them in the viewfinder when they're zooming around.
Manually focusing and tracking wild birds in flight is an extremely
frustrating nearly impossible task. You never know where they're going
next.
They move too fast and their direction changes too often. You only have a
moment to get the shot before they're gone. A photographer with less
equipment will set up on a tree and wait. He'll get shots of eagles but he
won't get the shots we're talking about.
