March 4th, 2016 – Avian Friday: Bald Eagle
Another Bald Eagle image this week, this one is from a couple of seasons back. Normally we are shooting away from the shaded spot of the tree landing perches so it really difficult to suddenly change exposure settings on the fly to swing back around and capture them landing in the trees. That’s one of the big benefits of shooting in RAW format, in that you have a much greater latitude to adjust the exposure in post-processing. One of the very useful features in Lightroom is the adjustment brush. In this shot I used it to lighten the shadow area on the bird first before making a global adjustment to brighten the entire image. I wanted to keep the overall shaded image of the background while making the shadow portion of the bird visible and without sacrificing all the highlight detail on the Eagle as well. In a couple more months it will be time to shoot these guys again and I’m definitely looking forward to it.
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus Leptocephalus )
Seabeck, Washington
Canon 1DX, EF 500/4L IS USM/Hand-held
500mm | 1/2500th Sec. @f/5| ISO 320
Processed with Lightroom CC, Photoshop CC, Nik ColorEfx.
To see a larger version please click on the image.
Feel free to comment below if you like what you see or have any other observations.
Thanks for stopping by,
JayT
Sirfishalot's Blog 
Nice picture of wingspan on this eagle. All your pictures are incredible