You date your camera body and marry your lens, right? That’s why they cost so much, or so we photographers say to try to justify purchasing fancy lenses for our fancy cameras. I invested in a much needed upgrade to my camera a couple years ago, and because that wasn’t enough, I upgraded again this past summer to a full frame Nikon Z6. It’s hard to justify buying nice lenses when you’re using an eight year old D40 that has a resolution of about an astounding 8 megapixels so I never really went after the nice lenses. So now that I have the camera, I have started looking into those nicer lenses, knowing I’ll be able to use them to their full capacity (and they will work on future cameras. Not that I’m planning on upgrading again anytime soon!).

For years and years (and even more years) I’ve dreamed of owning a telephoto lens to photograph wildlife. Since I’m against getting up close and personal with a moose (remind me to tell you the story of the time I did get up close and personal with a moose—accidentally.) I want to be able to take pictures of them that aren’t just little black dots on the screen. You can only zoom in so much before the quality of the picture greatly denigrates, even with a high megapixel camera. My boyfriend has an amazing Tamron 150-600mm lens but it unfortunately does not work with my camera so I have silently plotted his death so I could acquire his camera and lens. I mean, jealously drooled while he got the amazing close up shots of their eyeballs and I had pictures of what looked like fleas sitting in a field.

After a recent trip where we saw about 20 eagles at a distance, I whined once more about how much I wanted a telephoto lens. The 24-70mm was not cutting it. The fire had been lit and suddenly I had found a lightly used 80-400mm and was sitting in Panera in Denver, buying it off of someone on Craigslist.

Of course I immediately wanted to play with it so the next Sunday morning we went to two spots we knew had wildlife. At first I struggled with the focus and being able to hold this heavy lens steady. Do you know how hard that is? It felt like I was in the middle of an earthquake with how much I was shaking the camera around. Let’s just say the amount of sky pictures I took with nothing in them at all was pretty impressive.

My favorite shots of the day were of this deer with a magpie sitting on it’s antlers, and that of a juvenile bald eagle and an adult fighting over fish. The deer was sitting so impossibly still that for a second I thought they had put a deer decoy out in this field. Eventually it flicked an ear but it must have been sleeping because these birds were all over it and it did not bat an eye for the better part of ten minutes. As you can see in this image it is a bit out of focus as it was one of the earlier images where I had yet to really get a handle on the focus and how to hold the camera still for long enough.

The eagles were on this frozen lake, dozens of them, but I had a prime spot close to three juveniles and one adult all vying for the same fish which one of the juveniles had. This juvenile was not pictured here (see fluffier bird above), but it was considerably larger than the others and did put up quite the fight. The adult eventually soared into a tree just overhead, staring at its feet as if it were perplexed that there had been fish there but where had it gone?

Luck must have been on my side because I managed to capture several shots almost by accident of the eagles in flight, and while they’re not super sharp, they’re still enough in focus to be good. At least good enough for me! I usually am the person who puts the camera down for a second and in that second the animal (or small child) does something spectacular and I miss it. Sunday I was more on top of my game, even if my arm tired a lot faster from holding up this monster.

By the end of the day, as the sun was setting on the eagles lighting them up in a lovely golden glow, I had finally gotten the hang of the lens and the images were much sharper than the initial images. I love how sharp this one is, his fierce gaze really captured in the sunset.

lifestyle + landscapes

Barr Lake : Chasing Eagles

— AERE Photography —