Originally posted by JimS_256 Thanks!
Great image, most of my best, in focus, shots are of eagles leaving too. Any tips on identifying male and female? For Bald Eagles I know that males are smaller but that's about it. I'm not an expert birder.
How do you like the Sigma 500 F4.5? I really like my DA*300 + 1.4 TC. It's easy to hand hold and I like the flexibility of moving around. I think if I went with a 500mm or bigger I'd have to go with a gimbal tripod but longer lenses have a certain attraction that's hard to resist.
White-tailed are very similar to bald, and size is the best indicator there as well. It's easier when you see them together of course. For this particular pair I have been to visit them before, and she is the youngest. When they established their territory four years ago she was a four year old, so her tail had a solid rim of black. He was adult with a completely white tail. They attempted breeding without success the first two years, but I was told that they produced young in both 2016 and 2017, so she is grown up now. But you can still find a tiny bit of black at the rim of her tail feathers and two little black feathers on the tail coverts, so that is how I knew that this was the female!
I only got the 500mm in October, and I didn't get as much chance to practise as I would have liked to. It is never going to replace my DA*300 for sure - I can carry that everywhere, focus is fast and it is easy to hand hold as you say. On this trip I brought an H-harness and went for a walk around the lake with the DA*300 on my right and the Sigma 500 on my left. My shoulders were killing me the next couple of days!
I managed to shoot a duck-hunting sequence before the photo that I posted above - but I had to give up shooting it with the Sigma. It kept losing focus. I was in a bird hide, so although I didn't take my tripod I had windowsill-support, but after losing focus a couple of times I switched to my DA*300 and it worked a lot better. Walking back to the car the eagle flew towards me and came quite close, and this is when I took the photo above. I took some while it was coming towards me, but the head was never exactly in the focus plane. I don't know if AF speed is the problem, or if I just need to practise more.
The AF performance is definitely what I am the least happy with so far: It finds focus "inwards" from infinity, but if it moves past my target I can't get it to refind focus "outwards" at all - I have to manually focus at infinity and try again. That is no good for action sequences, really. I don't have much of a clue why, though. Could be my copy, could be a bit of dust on my sensor, or it could be that there is something about the lens I still need to learn.
When it gets the focus right, it is very sharp though, and the bokeh is beautiful.