Conowingo Dam, Round 2

Once again I've been seeing good trip reports from the dam, and I had the day off from work, so I went. This time there was very light traffic and I arrived in morning twilight with a handful of photographers already there and the turbines running and a thick bank of fog blanketing the whole area. The water was high so I couldn't set up on my preferred spot on the rocks; it was under water. The terrace was closed; even the fishermen were blocked out.

I set up along the fence in an area that had no trees to obstruct the view and waited. Sometimes the fog was so thick that it obscured the dam entirely.

Of course I always check other photographers' gear out. I'm shooting with a full frame Nikon, 500mm lens, on a Gitzo tripod, with a Wimberley gimbal head. For the first time in the years I've been going there, I feel like my gear is average. The guy next to me was shooting an 800mm lens. Most everyone else seemed to have something in the range of 500mm lenses, plus or minus 100mm. Most tripods were Gitzo or RRS, and most heads were gimbals, although I saw a weird setup with a gimbal head mounted to a ball head. Some photographers were shooting with ball heads or pan/tilt heads. I keep expecting to see mirrorless cameras among the photographers, but there weren't any this trip.

We waited in the fog. And waited. Finally at about 10AM the sun started breaking through. Quite a few eagles were present on the far shore, dozens by my count. And lots of cormorants and pigeons and gulls. A few herons were also there. Most of the action this day took place either too far away or in mist so thick that the camera had trouble acquiring focus.

I got few keepers this trip because of the distance and mist, and here they are.

Cormorant in the Mist with a Huge Fish

 Eventually the cormorant gave up and let the fish go; it was too big to eat.

Distant Action

 There were lots of distant eagle-in-flight interactions.

Great Blue Heron Skims the Water

Nearly Mature Looking for Fish

Rare Close Flyby

Which One of these Doesn't Belong?

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Who Knew There is at Least One Deer on the Island?

I never saw this deer. I was trying to follow a bird in flight and missed the bird but inadvertently got a shot of this deer on the island. I guess it or its mother swam over?

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So I'll wait for it to get colder to force more eagles to migrate south through the area, and hope for good weather on a day that I can take off from work, and I'll make the trip again if I can.