Bald eagle

[Steve Foss]

From Vermilion today. Walleyes and wind were snapping, and the birds were flying.

[jerkin'm]

Cool pic, I assume you tried a couple new spots today>>???

[Steve Foss]

I did. Strong southerlies made it hard to get to the west end of your "milk run," so I abandoned the last couple spots. Saw two fish. Had one, a 40-incher, following in everything I threw and nose to lure on the figure eights, but no takers.

Today is another day. Light north winds. I'm heading out in a few minutes.

[Tom Wilson]

NICE!!!

[jonny_redhorse]

nice photo Steve!...love these eagles......I remember the old days when we rarely saw an eagle back in the 60's!...certainly a beautiful bird......jonny

[buscher101]

Please tell me what type of camara do you use, Or is there somthing comparable. I just love your pictures. I have a ditigal. Is yours ? How much do I need to spend? thank you.....

[Steve Foss]

buscher: I use a Canon 20D digital SLR. It's an 8.2-megapixel camera. The lens is Canon's 100-400 mm image stabilizer. The camera and lens each cost between $1,200 and $1,400, depending on where you buy them. That's a chunk of money, but I use this equipment to make a lot of my living. Both in shooting sports, news and feature photos at the newspaper and in my nature photography business, the best camera/lens I can afford is vital.

You can get equally good results on less demanding shots with less expensive digital cameras, but to catch birds in flight in focus, it's pretty important to make sure you have a fast SLR body, not a compact all-in-one digital, and a good telephoto lens that autofocuses fast enough to do the job. It's easier with a bird flying sideways to you, because that doesn't require the lens/camera to do a lot, but for a bird flying at the camera, like that eagle, it takes a fairly sophisticated camera/lens setup to get it. In the old days of manual focus, the shooter would have to track the bird by focusing manually, which is one talent that's fallen by the way with sophisticated autofocus.

Canon and Nikon both make very nice digital SLRs for under $1,000. Canon's is the Digital Rebel XT, and I believe Nikon's is some version of the D70. The XT has an 8-megapixel sensor, and I believe the D70 is around 6 megapixels. (My lack of Nikon knowledge is no disrespect. Nikon makes great equipment. I've just always been a Canon shooter). Megapixel count is only part of the story, however. The quality and size of the sensor itself can make 6 Mp images from some cameras better than 8 Mp images from others. That's particularly true when you compare an 8 Mp compact all-in-one to a 6 Mp SLR. The SLR sensor will be larger than the compact's, and that makes for better picture quality in a couple key ways that are too complicated to go into in this forum.

If all you want to do is post photos online, like in this forum or through e-mail to friends and family, the digital SLR is overkill, because computer monitor resultion is about one fourth the resolution needed to make good photo prints. Any compact digital has enough Mp count to post low-resolution online pictures.

You can get telephoto lenses for a few hundred bucks, but if you want the sharpest possible photos and the best ability to track and autofocus, you'll spend over $1,000 for really good glass. Canon's is the image stablization (IS). Nikon uses basically the same technology and calls it vibration reduction (VR). In either case, using battery power, a mechanical device within the lens stabilizes the image and removes a lot of the vibration/waver you get from hand holding a big lens. Canon also has binoculars using that technology.

There are a lot more ins and outs to this, so let me know if you have a further interest in all that. You can shoot me an e-mail if you'd like.