Critique my eagle/general wildlife questions

[tetchypoo]

I shot about 200 pictures of this bald eagle having lunch on a lake near my house and most of them turned out sort of meh. I shot using a Nikon D7000 at ISO 100, 1/2500, f5.6. The lens is the 55-200mm f4-5.6.

Since I'm fairly new to photography, I wasn't prepared for the exposure of a brightly lit, snow covered lake, so this shot was brightened 1.85EV and the WB was tweaked a bit in ViewNX. I then moved it over to ACR to make the yellow of the eagle pop a bit more, as well as to sharpen the image a small fraction.

My critique question(s) is(are) 1) Did I make a mistake shooting into the sun with this eagle? I could have approached it from the other side to get the shot to pop a bit more, but I was walking on a crackling lake and I wasn't exactly thinking too strongly at that point. 2) Is it "acceptable" to bring the blues out in the lake as much as I did for the sake of contrast? It looks just a fraction unrealistic to me and I'm not sure what the laws of realistic nature shots state for this type of photography.

This is my first post on Digital Photography, but after having looked around, it will be the first of many. Thank you!

(slightly larger image) All sizes | GDK_3045_01 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I can't beleive that nobody has taken the time to comment on this. First off, GREAT JOB! Very sharp. I am only a tiny bit sorry that a tiny bit of the magnificent animals tail feathers were cut off. I think shooting into the sun was fine, you still have a lot of detail in the shadows. I am not a fan of the blue. The dark on light is enough contrast for me.. this blue almost looks like incandesent white balance.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by tetchypoo

1) Did I make a mistake shooting into the sun with this eagle?

You take what you can get. If you'd taken the time to walk to the other side, you might have missed the shot altogether. While you hope you can find a bird with the sun at your back, sometimes you're just in a tough spot and that's that. Getting the capture at all is a great achievement.

The only issues I see are a) the underexposure caused by the brightness of the background means you've lost some shadow detail on the eagle, and b) the timing being just a hair off so you missed getting the tail in the frame.

2) Is it "acceptable" to bring the blues out in the lake as much as I did for the sake of contrast? It looks just a fraction unrealistic to me and I'm not sure what the laws of realistic nature shots state for this type of photography.

I'd say absolutely, as long as you aren't planning on selling it as a photojournalist image, where extremes of processing are pretty much a no-no. For artistic purposes, whatever works for you is probably fine.