Picture of the Day - 1/17/2011

Bald Eagle Pair, Eleven Mile Canyon, CO - This nesting pair of bald eagles was captured last Saturday in Eleven Mile Canyon near Lake George, CO. While fairly skittish, they posed for quite  while on this branch - at least long enough for me to deploy the 600 mm lens with 1.4X teleconverter on my Canon 1D Mk2 (for a total equivalent 1092 mm focal length). This image was cleaned up and cropped slightly for composition. Normally, I'd place the birds more to the right side, so they were "looking in" to the frame. However, I liked the symmetry of the branch, so centered them. Here's a situation where you want to avoid using "matrix" or "evaluative" metering, as the eagles heads will likely overexpose, due to the dominant dark background. Best to use manual exposure in this case. Spot-metering their heads may also help prevent overexposure. Settings, ISO 800, Shutter 1/1600th second, aperture open all the way at f5.6.