I took these pictures in Northeastern Hokkaido in the middle of Winter. You can go out on the boats to the edge of the sea ice where they throw fish heads, but my best pictures were in the harbor town of Rausu. Sea Eagles line the harbor edges, and when the fishing ships come in, they fight for scraps.
In this situation, the juvenile (note speckled wings) was on the attack and surprised the adult into squeezing his fish a little too hard. The fish sort of broke in half, and fell into the juvenile's claws. The food fight ended in a claw-grappling dive from a third eagle, but it is a little hard to make out the details of who has whom in those final images.
This is an example of the importance of luck, i.e. being in the right place at the right time. I guess our job is to make luck happen, but it's still luck. My friends were down below the slope, so when the food fight started, their photography was against the hill, while mine was against the sky. My lens was the 18-200mm on crop-frame Nikon D90. I think a bigger/heavier lens would have made my shot harder, as the action was close enough that I had to hand-hold and pan. My cropping here is maybe about 70%; From 4288x2848 to 1125x900.
Also, I should have had my camera on its fastest, machine-gun, setting. I got four or six shots, when I could have had 10 or 16 to choose from. Luckily, I go two that were primo!
Settings are 1/1000 sec at f/8 and ISO 200. 200mm on APS. I think 1/1000 was luckily correct for the fast action. f/8 gave me focus on one bird, but maybe a lesser focus on the other. I'm still inexperienced on the Nikon AF tracking. The other issue is the difficulty of matching sky color and tone between multiple shots. Is there an easy way to automatically force skies to match across mutliple shots?
Great interaction and story. Please be sure to just post one image per thread, even though this would be best as a sequence, those are the rules.
The easy way to keep the sky constant, shot to shot, is to shoot in manual exposure. Don't let the camera change the exposures.
I think you could go a bit looser on your crops here, esp. on the sides, but thats a matter of taste.
I like them both but the first one is most dynamic. In the future do not one image per initial post unless for educational purposes or to answer a posted question :D
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Sorry; I didn't realize the one-per rule. Maybe occasionally do a thread/IOTW involving paired shots?
How do I get the thumbnail to the left of the thread? Do I have to use the attachment upload rather than embedding an image link? I couldn't find it in the FAQ, which, by the way, appears white on white on my pages.
I think my framing was limited on one side or another, and I wanted the two images to have the same size birds. Sky is easy-ish to add, although subtle changes in shade are surprisingly hard to reproduce. I normally don't want to spend the effort to extend a canvas.
Steller's Sea Eagle Food Fight
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