I went to Les Aigles de Leman today. It is near Evian in France (which you may know is the place where the Evian bottled water comes from) and it has lots of birds of prey. Some of them were sitting on perches outside their huts without any intervening glass or wire so I took the opportunity to take a few close up shots in between the showers. I think I have the names right but if not and if you can tell from just head shots please let me know.
All taken with 1 DsMk2 and 300mm 2.8.
C&C welcome.Thanks for looking.
Martin
1 Bald Eagle
2 African Fish Eagle
3 African Fish Eagle preening

4 Condor
5 Golden Eagle
6 Royal Eagle, looking a bit wet and not so royal!

Wow that's a great variety of Eagles Martin.
Kind of hot on the whites of number 1 and number 4 Condor.
It doesn't look blown to the point of losing all of the detail though.
You might try a 50 % Grey layer and tone down the whites OR
Use the Shadow / Highlight on a new layer and bring down the hi lites a tad

The place you went sounds very interesting and your fortunate to have such a great variety of eagles close by.

Great shots

Ant

Here Martin,

I hope you don't mind. I tried a little Ant Flavor Flave on your Bald E shot.

I used the Shadow / Highlight tool
Burn tool for a few more of the whites
Noise Removal
Slight Smart Sharpen using Socrate Technique on Luminosity
Added your Copyright

I only had the .jpg file so I wasn't able to recover the whites like I would have preferred. I think with the Raw you could do a much better job...........

Ant

Oh if it bothers you I reworked it PM Me or just say so and I will delete it

Very nice
I once shot a bunch of birds of prey that way...that was in London Zoo...and they were stuffed.
So nice job on the real deal

edit : nice changes, anywhere I can read on the Socrate technique ?

Still a few hot spots on the Head but It's hard to regain detail that's not in the
.jpg file.

Sorry about that > I hate to go any further on the whites as it doesn't look natural the further you go.

Ant

anthony whitmo wrote:
Wow that's a great variety of Eagles Martin.
Kind of hot on the whites of number 1 and number 4 Condor.
It doesn't look blown to the point of losing all of the detail though.
You might try a 50 % Grey layer and tone down the whites OR
Use the Shadow / Highlight on a new layer and bring down the hi lites a tad

The place you went sounds very interesting and your fortunate to have such a great variety of eagles close by.

Great shots

Ant
Thanks Anthony for the advice, I have not used layers yet so I tried to fix them in Lightroom. Think the first one of the Bald Eagle worked out better. The Condor one lost some of the other colors but I am posting it for critique. These feathers were really very white though, like a white stole!
Cheers,
Martin
ps. I had not seen that you redid the shot of the Bald Eagle but am pleased you did and we can compare the two!

Martin,

how nice to be able to go & see all these birds in one place. You got some nice portraits here.

Lil

Beautiful headshots of some dramatic birds!

Jenna

Four Eagles in one place - what an opportunity, Martin! Your chance came along and you nailed them. It would be nice to view their entire body too. If you have such shots, maybe you can post them.

GENE

I hope you don't mind. I tried a little Ant Flavor Flave on your Bald E shot.

I used the Shadow / Highlight tool
Burn tool for a few more of the whites
Noise Removal
Slight Smart Sharpen using Socrate Technique on Luminosity
Added your Copyright

I only had the .jpg file so I wasn't able to recover the whites like I would have preferred. I think with the Raw you could do a much better job...........

Oh if it bothers you I reworked it PM Me or just say so and I will delete it

Still a few hot spots on the Head but It's hard to regain detail that's not in the
.jpg file.

Sorry about that > I hate to go any further on the whites as it doesn't look natural the further you go.

Ant
Thanks again Anthony. I guess when the whites are blown you can only get them back so much.
Martin

mercapto wrote:
Very nice
I once shot a bunch of birds of prey that way...that was in London Zoo...and they were stuffed.
So nice job on the real deal

edit : nice changes, anywhere I can read on the Socrate technique ?
No comparison is there! Can't beat the real thing.Not sure if the Socrate technique has been or could be documented but it should!
Best is to view his posts and pick up his tips as we go along!
Thanks for the comment.
Martin

Lil Judd wrote:
Martin,

how nice to be able to go & see all these birds in one place. You got some nice portraits here.

Lil
Thanks Lil.
I think there was even a lot more but they were not all on their perches on the day.
But leaves some material for another visit.
Martin
Raindrop_333 wrote:
Beautiful headshots of some dramatic birds!

Jenna
Thanks Jenna. Glad you liked them.
Martin

genemiller wrote:
Four Eagles in one place - what an opportunity, Martin! Your chance came along and you nailed them. It would be nice to view their entire body too. If you have such shots, maybe you can post them.

GENE
Thanks GENE. I wanted to get a good close up shot because there was no wire or glass but also because their perches are manmade and it was not the same as getting a shot in the wild with the eagles in their natural habitiat and it takes away a bit from the dignity of these beautiful and majestic birds. All the same I have gone back over my images and here are some fuller pictures but you may see my point better with the actual images.
Martin

Here is the information from Socrate. It was in a post here on the Nature and Wildlife forum. I commented on that post to bump it back to the front page.

But here it is removed from that post and pasted here.

This is Shasoc (Socrate's) technique

I only do the sharpening as my last adjustment (no sharpening in RAW) and I use the Smart Sharpening tool. Amount 100 - Radius 0.2 - Remove: lens blur - More accurate: Unchecked. I usually do one, to three passes with that setting as needed. After every pass I use the fade command (go to edit/fade sharpening/luminosity mode) and I use the Luminosity mode to apply the sharpening only to luminosity. This has the same effect as converting to Lab mode and sharpening the Luminosity channel only, but it is faster and less destructive . If needed I reduce the opacity a bit also. I hardly use the advanced mode of the Smart sharpening.
Those are my settings for the web sharpening. For the normal sharpening I use higher values for the radius, but I hardly exceed 1.0. Uncheck/check the "Preview" check box to have a better view of how much sharpening you've applied. When you think your sharpening looks good reduce the opacity of about 20% because we all have the tendency to oversharpen a bit.
It is also important to get the image's overall tonality right to begin with. This will bring more detail to be sharpened.


Hope that helps guys

Anthony

Oh and here is the post with the information in it

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/649130

Ant

Thanks Anthony,
I have opened a Word file now for reference and copied and pasted this in .

Hasn't anyone told you, you're a real gem!
Martin

Chad says I'm a DH
My wife says "Oh your something alright"



Does any of that count??

No Problem Martin >> glad to help any way I can

Ant

anthony whitmo wrote:

Chad says I'm a DH
My wife says "Oh your something alright"



Does any of that count??

No Problem Martin >> glad to help any way I can

Ant

Every bit counts Anthony Chad just has his very own way of expresing it. I am sure you know exactly what your wife means!

BTW I went back to the site of Les Aigles du Leman and they have a video there where they went hangliding with a Bald Eagle.The eagle even landed on the hanglider in flight and was filmed from that and another hanglider. I am sure it must be the same Bald Eagle that I took a shot of and that we have been doing the PP on.
You can see the video at http://www.lesaiglesduleman.fr/v2/Accueil.html. Its a long video in french but you can push the slider up to about halfway to see the hangliding and the eagle.
Martin

Marten I can see these birds are wearing Jesses on there legs so I was wondering if they are captive and have some kind of perment injury to keep them as residend birds or are they healthy enought to go back to the wild?
Lou

Beautiful work, Martin. Would prefer to catch them in the wild but will never pass up an opportunity to like this either

Ken

I love the head shots Martin... but I do have to admit that the Anthony treatment helped the whites in some of these... all in all a very interesting series.

Terry

Good shots, Martin! Though I agree with Ant about the white details in that one BE pic; Ant did a good job in fixing things up . Looks like a great place to see raptors Up Close and Personal...

Best Wishes,
Steve

Hi Martin, eagle head shots, very interesting #3 is a neat comp, must have been cool to see in the viewfinder! I think the rework that Anthony did looks very good on your image too.

Karl

lbuscher wrote:
Marten I can see these birds are wearing Jesses on there legs so I was wondering if they are captive and have some kind of perment injury to keep them as residend birds or are they healthy enought to go back to the wild?
Lou
Hi Lou,
Well they are held in captivity so I guess they are captive all right. But from what I can see these birds are healthy and well looked after. Even the quality of the Jesses speak for that. In addition this enterprise seems to be a participative one as distinct from a zoo where the animals are on display and there is little interaction with them. Here the birds are handled by trained falconeers and I would suspect that this contributes to their well being. In an earlier reply I mentioned that the website had a video where the Bald Eagle went flying free with its handlers flying alongside in a hanglider. One could argue if they were really free when they are trained to come to lures but overall they seem to be much much better than animals in a zoo. They sure would be healthy enough to go back to the wild but they probably would have to be trained to fend for themselves to do so.
Thanks for the question which opens up a really interesting topic.
Martin


Mr Zoom wrote:
Beautiful work, Martin. Would prefer to catch them in the wild but will never pass up an opportunity to like this either

Ken

Thanks Ken for your kind comment. You are right of course and I would much have preferred to photo these in the wild but not any other opportunities here.
Martin

Terry D wrote:
I love the head shots Martin... but I do have to admit that the Anthony treatment helped the whites in some of these... all in all a very interesting series.

Terry


trailhiker wrote:
Good shots, Martin! Though I agree with Ant about the white details in that one BE pic; Ant did a good job in fixing things up . Looks like a great place to see raptors Up Close and Personal...

Best Wishes,
Steve

Karl Witt wrote:
Hi Martin, eagle head shots, very interesting #3 is a neat comp, must have been cool to see in the viewfinder! I think the rework that Anthony did looks very good on your image too.

Karl
Thanks Terry, Steve and Karl.
Yes Anthony did a good job in fixing it up all right and he has retained the color better in the eye and the beak than in the version I did. Will have to pay more attention to the exposure when shooting white subjects. I might go back and try again as there were a couple of other eagles I did not have the time to photo.
Martin

Some wonderful shots Martin, it must be nice to have all of these available. YOu and Anthonys redo of #1 looks real good.

Doug