Eagle & Musk Ox Trip Report – September 2017

And the most important member of the team – “Brew Dog”

KLM  screwed up Malcolms arrival in Trondheim by a few hours, and managed to separate him from his hold luggage for an astonishing 72 hours, but other than that, the trip was hitch-free.

Other than my good pal Mohamed, none of the guys on this trip had really spent much “up close and personal” time with Musk Ox or White-tailed Eagles before – they were in for a few surprises on those two scores. And ‘shock & awe’ at just how much ‘stuff’ Mohamed buys from the Spa shop in Lauvsnes to take home to Cairo!

We had spotted a lone bull Muskie on the way up on the Friday evening.  He was only perhaps 300m from the main E6, but there’s a big cold river and a railway line between the road and the bull, so getting to him would be somewhat indirect.

Sig arrived early on the Saturday morning and said that the bull was pretty much in the same place – great!  But we couldn’t approach him from the shorter, eastern access point because that would have meant approaching him from upwind – not really a good idea all things considered.

So we were left with a much longer hike into what bit of breeze there was:

The military road heading north east on the aerial shot above has been torn out as part of the re-wilding of the fell – it looks like some freakish giant mole has been though the place, and it’s horrible to walk on.  Thank God there were no midges around; they’d have made the long hike murder!

But wow, was it worth it!

We spent pretty much the whole day in the company of this stunning animal – and being in such an amazing place made the whole experience feel like a real privilege.  Cheers Sig, you did it again…

The underlying theme of the week was getting to grips with the Canon 1DX2 autofocus system, and the different setting requirements for big, semi-static subjects like Musk Ox, and the somewhat closer, fast-moving eagles.  As I frequently demonstrate to folk on training days, one setup will NOT cover both categories of subject efficiently.

Now if we take a close look at an unprocessed raw file we can see the surprising amount of depth of field we get even at f6.3 – that’s just 1/3rd of a stop down from wide open with the internal teleconverter engaged.

Without the MA +5 value, with the TC engaged, the camera side of the Muskies head would be at the rear DoF limit – like the unripe berries on the juniper are in this full resolution unprocessed crop below:

On the Sunday we drove up into the mountains near Oppdal, close to the Sæterfjellet breeding station, to a location where Arctic Fox had been reported.  Sadly it was full of photographers and the foxes were having none of it, they stayed firmly out of sight.

I found a small quarry and decided to test out the new Irix 11mm:

And so we began the lengthy drive to Lauvsnes and the awesome eagles….it’s the pedal on the right Ole!

The weather was a bit grey and flat on Monday, but it got the guys used to the manic action that comes with eagle photography from the boat around the Lauvsnes coastline, without the added difficulty of the boat pitching and rolling.

Plus it gave Phil Piper a chance to try some drag shutter Eagle shots:

But once we got into Tuesday the wind began to build, and Wednesday/Thursday saw plenty of long swell and the boat heaving a few feet – usually upwards as an eagle is coming down!  The workload was now up to it’s normal degree of severity, and I have to say that all the guys coped with it admirably.

Super-imposing the two shots above and lining the bait and swell up, clearly shows the distance traveled by the eagle between two successive frames at 10 frames per second. You can think of a mature White-tail as being around 1 metre from end to end, so the speed is around 10 metres per second.

A 1 meter change at 60 or 70 meters is something of a minor change, but at sub 25 meters like these then that same distance change becomes something major than minor.

Tracking Sensitivity and Accel/decel tracking control the system resistance/sensitivity to major and minor changes, but in truth these settings will fall short when a fast subject gets close – that point where minor changes become major ones.

The result will invariably be back-focused images.

But we can help the system be making it focus closer to the camera than it thinks it should do, and we can do this very easily with negative AF MA values – in these cases -3.

Here is a quick sequence of O.J. aka “The Terminator” – big, permanently angry, fearless of close proximity to the boat, ignorer of wind direction, and fast.

Every shot tack sharp, and the sequence covers just shy of 1 second because, according to Lightroom, they were all taken at the same second!

Yup, told you he was fast!  Not quite as psychotic as the late lamented Brutus, but not far off.

So all in all, a good trip, with happy clients – I couldn’t ask for more!

Let’s finish with a couple of sunset eagles.

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