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My office when photographing bald eagles on the Chilkat River

November 16, 2011 by John L. Dengler

Photographic equipment belonging to independent photojournalist John L. Dengler set up along the  banks of the Chilkat River where John was photographing bald eagles. SPECIAL NOTE: iPhone photo (John L. Dengler)

Here’s a closeup peek of my “office” when photographing bald eagles on the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve in southeast Alaska.

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Most of my bald eagle photography is with my Nikon 600mm f/4 lens on a Nikon D3 body which are mounted on a heavy duty tripod and Wimberly tripod head. Both the camera and lens are protected from the elements with a ThinkTank Hydrophobia rain cover. I keep the cover on the lens at all times so I don’t have to fool with putting it on should it start to rain or snow.

I have the rest of my other lenses, Pocket Wizards, tele-extender, strobes, audio recorder, and video equipment in my Kiboko camera backpack bag made by Gura Gear. Also pictured is a Thermarest sleeping pad. The pad isn’t for sleeping but rather to protect my butt and feet from the cold.

Finally, most important of all, I have my lunch, usually a sandwich with cookies or english muffins from my Haines friends Joanne & Phyllis. Yum.

The photo below is the “office” view from the spot above with Four Winds Mountain in the background.

Ice forms on the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve near Haines, Alaska. In the background is Four Winds Mountain. SPECIAL NOTE: iPhone photo (John L. Dengler)

 


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Getting down with bald eagles

January 20, 2011 by John L. Dengler

Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) fight over a salmon carcass along the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve near Haines, Alaska. During late fall, bald eagles congregate along the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve to feed on salmon in what is believed to be the largest gathering of bald eagles in the world. (John L. Dengler)

I would like to share with you several tips I have found useful when photographing bald eagles at the Alaska Bald Eagle Preserve near Haines.

First, get as low to the ground as possible. In other words, put your camera on the same level as your subject (in this case a pair of fighting bald eagle in the photo above). This does several things. It usually cleans up your background, particularly when shooting with a telephoto lens. It also gives the viewer the same perspective that the bald eagle has making the photo feel more intimate. Sometimes, this means my lens is literally on the ground, requiring that I lay on the frozen ground. To stay warm (and somewhat clean), I’ll use a closed-cell foam backpacking sleeping pad. I like the accordion style as they pack small but are still long. The video below gives you an example of how low to the ground I sometimes set my camera and tripod. It also gives you a sense of the shooting conditions on the river.



Obviously, this position isn’t very good for flight photography. For flight photography, you’ll want to be standing up. In this case, you can use the backpacking sleeping pad to stand on to further insulate the bottom of your boots from snow and the cold ground.

I have found that I need to use a high shutter speed if my goal is to stop bald eagle action (fighting or flight). By high shutter speed, I mean really high — at least 1/1,600 of a second minimum. I’ve had better luck getting useable photos by keeping the shutter speed high, even if it means raising the ISO. Even on a bright sunny day, late fall-early winter light in Alaska is low on the horizon and is not as bright as it seems. Also I set the lens wide open or no more than one f-stop stopped down. This isolates the subject better, plus it helps with keeping the shutter speed high and ISO low.

When shooting birds in flight, pan with the bird before you start shooting and continue to pan while you are shooting and even after you stop shooting. This keeps your lens movement smooth. If your lens has a vibration reduction or image stabilization feature, turn it off if you are shooting above 1/1,000 of a second. Leaving it on slows down your frame rate and can degrade your image quality.

When considering lenses,  set the instant return focus button (if your lens has an instant return focus button) to focus on say a fish carcass on the river bank. Then you can change focus for other activity, but can instantly be back in focus on the fish simply by pressing the return focus button.

Use a remote shutter release when shooting static images like a bald eagle in a tree, or shooting a situation where you are prefocused on a subject in anticipation of action. This allows you to keep a tripod-mounted lens, particularly a telephoto lens, rock steady from movement. One warning — I’ve had the cable that goes from the camera to the remote trigger crack and break at the connector. The normally very pliable cable becomes terribly rigid in the cold conditions that I encounter. To help with this, I will coil the cable so there is less stress on it, and will use a wrapping of Velcro to attach the release to my tripod so the release isn’t swinging about when I move the lens and tripod combo.

I’ve heard that micro-adjusting the focus of your lenses can make a difference in critical focus situations, particularly when using a teleconverter. One of my “housekeeping” projects for the new year is to micro-adjust my lenses. When you micro-adjust your lens you are precisely setting how your specific lens focuses with a specific camera body.

Finally, be aware of your light. Since you can’t ask a bald eagle to move to get in better light, study where light falls through the day. I’ve found different locations on the river where the light is optimum at different times of the day. For example, the magic light time for one of my favorite spots on the Chilkat River is a surprising 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. On the other hand, don’t be afraid of bad light either. Sometimes, less than optimal light forces you to approach a photographic situation differently rewarding you with different photographs. The key in these situations is to be aware of what you doing and what the result is going to be in a normally bad light situation.


ABOVE: Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) fight over a salmon carcass along the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve near Haines, Alaska. During late fall, bald eagles congregate along the Chilkat River in the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve to feed on salmon in what is believed to be the largest gathering of bald eagles in the world.

Denali clouds time-lapse experiment

October 15, 2010 by John L. Dengler

this experiment of a time-lapse of clouds swirling about Mt. McKinley, North America’s tallest peak, is a failure. Not so much a failure on my part, but rather Mother Nature was an unwilling subject. My goal was to take a sequence of still photos showing a fully socked-in McKinley turning into a brilliant clear mountain at dawn.

The chances of seeing Mt. McKinley (also commonly known by its Athabaskan name “Denali”) are slim at best. I had been told that it had been over a month from when the north side of Denali was last seen clearly in Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

Photo Gallery

Images from Denali National Park

One of the secrets of seeing the mountain, particularly if you are camping or backpacking in the Wonder Lake / McKinley River area is to set your alarm very early for a peek at what the weather is doing around the mountain. Often, Denali will be clear in the very early morning hours just before sunrise only to very quickly to become obscured (in less than an hour).

With this in mind, I set my Nikon D3 on a tripod in the direction of the mountain, and connected a Nikon MC-36 intervalometer which I had programed to automatically take a photo every minute beginning at 11:15 p.m. and lasting until 5:30 a.m. A total of 409 still images were captured and then later turned into this video.

In the end, the very top of Denali was only visible for approximately 3 minutes during the sequence period.

It was probably the easiest shooting I’ve ever done. The worst part was listening to camera’s shutter open and close during the course of the evening – every minute after minute. When your ears are attuned to listening for large mammals (aka Grizzly bears) crawling about outside your tent, it made for a restless few hours of sleep.

There were a couple of other problems. Because I only had one camera, I couldn’t take other photos. The late evening light of sunset (around midnight) and the ensuing twilight are great times for photography. Once I started taking the sequence photos, I couldn’t access the camera for any other photography. It became painful when after starting the sequence I began to see all kinds of other photo opportunities. Another problem is that a fresh camera battery is completely drained after approximately six hours. Since I only have four battery packs for my camera and the nearest electrical outlet for recharging is almost 100 miles away, I had to limit my attempts of getting the sequence. Talk about gambling! A final issue to consider is whether you can afford to have your memory card filled up with photos. For me, that is not a problem as I carry plenty of large capacity cards.

While the experiment was a good trial run, what did amaze me was how quickly the clouds moved in and out of the the area, real changes in just minutes. This was evident when looking at the individual frames sequentially. There are huge movements in the clouds in just a 60 second period. Due to the enormous size of Denali, the mountain makes its own weather. That is why it is impossible to predict when you will get a glimpse of the mountains 20,310 foot north peak. It’s also a reminder of the need to be prepared for rapidly changing weather when traveling anywhere near Denali and the other nearby mountains in the Alaska Range.

Like many failures, this attempt makes me want to get perfectly the sequence even more. You can be assured that I’ll be trying this again.


To see our collection of video clips, click here.

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