Valdez Eagles & More
There’s lots to photograph in and around Valdez. The wildlife is abundant, especially the eagles. You’ll need some special gear to get good shots though.
The Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery
There are many places in and around Valdez to view eagles. One of the best however is the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery outside of town. This fish hatchery rears massive quantities of Coho and Pink salmon to stock the area fisheries and the waters around the hatchery are jammed with fish. That brings in the sea lions to feed on the relatively easy pickings. When they feed they are pretty sloppy and there are tons of fish that get scattered around. The easy availability of fresh fish parts brings in the seagulls and eagles. Its a pretty busy place. Bears are also pretty frequent visitors here but we didn’t see any while we were there.
One of the issues we were dealing with in Alaska was smoke due to extensive forest fires. It pretty much shut us down for the big landscape shots that we hoped to get in Alaska. Having these wildlife photography opportunities was a blessing and it was fun watching the behavior of all the animals.
We hung out at the fish hatchery on three different days to photograph the goings on hoping to see some bear but no luck. We did however see lots of bald eagles and sea lions. The interactions between the eagles and the seagulls was a bit comical at times. There was definitely a pecking order evident from the much larger eagles. They would frequently steal food away from the gulls while the gulls complained loudly about the injustice. There’s a few images below:
Special photo gear
In order to photograph wildlife you’ll need a telephoto lens. The longer the better. Most serious wildlife photographers carry a big 600mm f/4 telephoto lens that costs $10,000. I’m not that serious of a wildlife photographer although I’d love to have one of those. The next best choice is one of the several 150-600mm zoom lenses that have been introduced over the last few years. Tamron and Sigma are two such manufacturers. I have the Tamron G2 telephoto and it does a pretty good job as long as you know its limitations. The Tamron currently sells for $1200 so it’s not a huge hit to the wallet.
One of the advantages to the smaller telephoto zooms is you can actually hand hold these and get good results. The lenses have image stabilization built in and for a short duration, hand holding is an option. Even with these though, you can tire out pretty quickly and will need some sort of support. The second piece of specialty gear I have for wildlife photography is the Wimberley WH-200 Gimbal mount.
This is a device that allows very fluid movement of a camera and telephoto lens for following wildlife in motion. It does this by counterbalancing the weight of the camera/lens combination on a gimbal making it effortless to move around. This also provides much more stability than hand holding alone, resulting in many more in focus images. It currently sells for $595 so it’s not cheap but if you want to do a lot of wildlife photography it’s an accessory worth looking into. There are several photos of the Wimberley Gimbal in use below:
Making the Photograph
Photographing birds in flight is tough, even with the right equipment. It takes practice and trial & error. The Wimberley Gimbal head sure helps you stay out there and shoot for long periods of time without fatigue. In this case that’s what it took. I went back over several days and just kept watching the eagles as they flew around. I have lots of shots that didn’t work out.
A couple of tips though may help. One, make sure your shutter speed is fast enough. For the featured image at the top I used a 1/1600th of second to make sure it was sharp. Two, shoot in bursts of shots using the fastest continuous shooting mode your camera has. It’s hard to predict when the birds’ wings will be just right. Third, watch your backgrounds. Birds against a featureless sky just don’t look all that good. If you can catch the bird against a mountain side as I did above it just makes them stand out better. Here’s a couple more below:
Final Thoughts
Valdez is a great location for wildlife photography. We really enjoyed watching the activity at the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery as it gave us an opportunity to see so much in a single location. Photographing eagles as they were in flight was a treat and it was great having the gimbal head on the tripod. It made it really enjoyable. We were getting shut out from the big landscape shots due to the wildfire smoke but this was just as rewarding.
As always, you can see higher resolution images on our Facebook page. Please give us a like while you’re there.
Nikon D850 with Tamron G2 150-600mm at 600mm. f/6.3 at 1/600th of a second. ISO 250
Check out our video from Valdez Here
