{"id":53778,"date":"2013-12-19T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?guid=940638aa0892a066e9d69d2753d27a3c"},"modified":"2024-06-17T14:18:50","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T13:18:50","slug":"bald-eagle-in-flight-and-changing-focusing-modes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/bald-eagle-in-flight-and-changing-focusing-modes\/","title":{"rendered":"Bald Eagle in Flight (and Changing Focusing Modes)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at Lake Jesup, a Bald Eagle flew very close to me. I was looking for ducks, loons and grebes sitting in the water at at the time, so I had my camera set for birds sitting still on the water. When shooting still birds, I normally select only the center focusing point and put the focusing mode on “One Shot.”<\/p>\n

When shooting birds in flight, I want all the focusing points active with the focusing mode on “AI Servo” to better track birds in flight. It’s a little bit of a pain to switch between these two shooting modes. If you try to shoot the bird in flight with “One Shot” and one focusing point, you’re likely to get a lot of blurry photos. But if you try to change the focusing points and focusing mode, you’re likely to miss the shot all together.<\/p>\n

There’s a solution to this problem, though. You can use the Custom Modes. Using custom modes, you just switch the dial on the camera to make all the changes. I use C1 for still birds and C2 for birds and flight. So yesterday when this Bald Eagle flew by, I quickly switched from C1 to C2 while swiveling my camera on its tripod and started shooting. It didn’t cost me any time.<\/p>\n

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Bald Eagle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Bald Eagle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Adult Bald Eagles can also be a little bit of a challenge to photograph, since they have dark bodies and white heads. It’s very easy to overexpose the head or under expose the body and\/or wings. And on sunny days, you can also sometimes lose contrast between the white head and a bright sky. But this eagle was pretty nice to me. In the first photo, I had one shot with the eagle’s wing behind it’s head, giving me nice contrast. There’s still shadow under it wings, but I like the shot anyway.<\/p>\n

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Bald Eagle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at Lake Jesup, a Bald Eagle flew very close to me. I was looking for ducks, loons and grebes sitting in the water at at the time, so I had my camera set for birds sitting still on the water. When shooting still birds, I normally select only the center focusing point and put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":2193186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"http:\/\/scottsimmons.smugmug.com\/DailyShoots\/2013\/12-07\/i-36PWr6G\/0\/L\/_MG_2032-L.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"Bald Eagle in Flight (and Changing Focusing Modes)","footnotes":""},"categories":[6984,5],"tags":[683,3245,2465],"class_list":["post-53778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-wildlife","tag-bald-eagle","tag-lake-jesup","tag-scott-simmons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2193186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}