After a whole spring of watching these eaglets grow up and fledge, this was by far the closest pass one ever made to me, and it was an amazing experience to live through, aside from photographing it. It was possibly as close as 10 feet away. It's an uncropped shot at 400mm on a 1.6 APS-C sensor. I wish I'd been quicker on my feet to zoom out a bit to catch the whole thing without losing the wingtips, but there was way too much excitement for that thought process to happen. On the other hand, the slight tip clip I think gives it a really larger than life, frame-filling kind of quality. Either way, I love the basic, graceful position like a airplane making a banana pass at an airshow. The whole top of the wings+body being in the same plane, increases the feeling of the huge area.
Canon 7D Mk. II, Tamron 100-400
1/1600, f/9.0, ISO 2000
Again the original shot was a bit underexposed, and I brought up the mids, but the darks not so much.... unlike the wood ducklings, here I wanted the dramatic effect of deep darks. Along with that I gave it a fair amount of contrast, and saturation.
There was an especially bright clump of leaves behind and above it that distracted from the subject, so I darkened and desaturated them. (Due to conflicting effects, I masked off the eagle and everything inside it is increased saturation, everything outside decreased). Another fix is that after everything else was done, an area of the beak, and yellow part of the face between the eye and the beak, were blown out so I masked that off separately and decreased the exposure about 3/4 of a stop.
What a beautiful eagle! Such poise and concentration on its face. Good dorsal view. There are two main issues here. The first is the clipped wings. I do realize you wish to have zoomed out. The clipped wingtips are problematic but since this is an uncropped image, you have the pixels to crop in even closer to purposefully "cut" the wings instead of having them accidentally clipped. The second issue, IMO, is that the background is too close to the subject, preventing good separation between those two elements. You did well in minimizing its effect in post, but its close presence is still unfortunate. Good job keeping focus on the face though...it is tack sharp and tastefully sharpened for presentation. Adding a good amount more of contrast will give the image some good "pop". Here's a repost that addresses the wings and contrast (I also darkened the lower left corner via burning):
Bald eaglet swooping
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