Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Golden Eyes

A mating pair of golden eye ducks on the Turners Falls Canal.

5 comments:

DB said...

Nice shot! I've always enjoyed taking pics of water fowl. The golden eye ducks remind me of the loons here in MN. Do they spook easily? I've been trying for ages to get a good shot of loons here, and they are so skitterish that even with a 300mm lens I can't get close enough to get a good shot at this point.

Peter Atwood said...

Thanks Jamie!

Yes, they are very skittish. These guys were probably 300 feet away at least. I had the 500mm with 1.4x on the 7D and still had to crop quite a bit. I'm going to try again soon and see if I can get closer.

Easy Wind said...

7D rocks!
Love how the water is rendered and I dig the subject matter.
I was mulling over the canon 100-400mm the other night, any input on that piece of glass..?
Also like the fixed 200mm, did you say you have that one in your arsenal?

Easy Wind said...

....so that, in effect, was shot at 1120mm!

Peter Atwood said...

That is correct. You can just never get close enough even with that big glass though. :)

Yeah, the 100-400 is a sweet lens. It seems really big if you aren't used to it but actually it's pretty compact. Quite versatile and the one of the more affordable of the bigger lenses. I have seen some great bird shots with them so if you're patient you can do a lot with it. It does kind of so-so with the 1.4x extender as far as autofocus is concerned and autofocus will not work very well at all with the 2x. If you have good technique you can manual focus though.

The 200mm 2.8 is fabulous! Highly recommended. It is very unobtrusive since it's black so a good one to bring into events. Takes the extenders very well. Fast focusing and the image quality is wonderful. They can be had used on the forums so cheap that it's almost embarrassing.