Super Zooming a Bald Eagle
While on a road trip in the Arizona high country, I stopped at a local park to eat my lunch and stumbled upon a bucket list photo opportunity. The lesson learned? Bring your super zoom camera with you wherever you go!
From the time that I first picked up a camera, I've wanted to capture a close-up picture of a Bald Eagle. Actually, that dream started even earlier when I got my first pair of binoculars and ventured out into nature. I've photographed a lot of birds - some larger than the Bald Eagle - but there's just something uniquely striking about the appearance and stature of a Bald Eagle. Yet after all these years of super zooming, I never saw one.
Payson, AZ on Google Maps.
Payson, AZ is up in the mountains and to the northeast of the Phoenix metropolitan area, nestled between Tonto National Forest and Sitgreaves National Forest. In April 2025, I drove up to Payson for a long weekend of photography with my Nikon COOLPIX P1100 super zoom camera. My goal that weekend was to explore the area and to try to capture the beautiful views of the pine forests.
Here's a view of Military Mine Outlook near Woods Canyon Lake:
But the Arizona high country is also Bald Eagle territory, so I was really hoping to get my first ever picture of a Bald Eagle. I had a simple plan for getting that bucket list shot. Bald Eagles like to eat fish, right? So my plan was to go to Woods Canyon Lake and Willow Springs Lake, hold out a fish fillet from the grocery store and wait for a Bald Eagle to fly over and land next to me :) Spoiler alert: that's not a good plan!
During my trip to Payson, I made one of those little decisions that seemed trivial at the time, but turned out to have a HUGE impact! I was hungry when I first arrived in the town of Payson, so I pulled over, opened Google Maps on my phone and looked for a somewhat scenic place to park and eat my lunch. Rumsey Park was relatively close to the hotel where I would be checking into later in the day, so I decided to head over there.
I put the car in gear and rolled forward to start the drive to Rumsey Park, but for some reason, I decided to check to see if there was another park in town. I looked at the map again and decided to change my lunch destination to Green Valley Park. For a person who loves zoom photography, that last minute decision would be the highlight of my trip!
Green Valley Park on Google Maps.
As I was driving up to the Green Valley Park parking lot, I noticed a man pointing his cell phone towards the top of a tree. I almost crashed the car when I looked up and saw a Bald Eagle! To say that I was super excited would be a huge understatement! I quickly parked the car, mounted my Nikon P1100 on my tripod and ran towards the tree with a Bald Eagle on it. I setup the tripod and immediately started recording a video of a super zoom that got super close to the Bald Eagle's head! I was afraid that the eagle might fly away at any minute. You can see my super zoom video of the Bald Eagle on my YouTube channel here.
The picture below was taken at the P1100's maximum optical focal length of 3000mm. The sunlight is coming in from behind the eagle, so the front side of the bird is in shadow. I brightened the shadows in the picture to compensate a little. I find that the P1100 doesn't balance highlights and shadows to my particular liking in some situations, so I adjust the highlights and/or shadows on the P1100's pictures from time to time. Bringing down the highlights can also bring out some details that are slightly blown out. So other than adjusting the highlights and shadows, and adding the One Lens Two watermark, the pictures in this article are .JPG files straight out of the camera. You can click on some of the pictures in this article to see the full size image.
I was able to get a few video clips and a bunch of pictures of the eagle before it flew away. Lots of people at the park also saw the eagle and they were all pointing and talking about it. But no one was as excited as me. I had waited to see this eagle in person for decades!
The picture below is my favorite picture of that day. The Bald Eagle is looking right at the camera. And at the time, it was looking right at me! The eagle is probably wondering what that human down there is so excited about!
You might be wondering why I took my favorite picture at a focal length of 2800mm when the P1100 can zoom in to 3000mm. The answer has to do with Depth of Field (DOF). DOF is the span that includes the closest thing in the picture that is in focus and the farthest thing in the picture that is in focus. Things that are outside the Depth of Field will not be in focus. It turns out that DOF becomes extremely narrow as the focal length extends into the super telephoto range. The longer the focal length, the narrower the Depth of Field.
At a focal length of 3000mm, depending on what the camera's autofocus system locks onto, the DOF can be so narrow that the tip of a bird's beak and its eyes might not both be within the Depth of Field at the same time. That means that at least one of them will not be in focus. Even when I attach my 7-inch external monitor to the P1100 with focus peaking turned on, it can be hard to see exactly what is in focus when you're out in the field. So after I capture a still image at 3000mm, I'll take another picture of the same scene at a focal length in the mid to upper 2000mm range to open up the DOF a little.
The P1100's pictures are much larger than the dimensions of this website, so I had to scale them down so that they would fit in the article. If I tried to show the pictures at their full size, you would only be able to see a small portion of them because they would expand beyond the article's visual boundaries. So, if we crop the full size picture to about the width of this article then we can get an even closer view of the Bald Eagle. And who doesn't want that? Check out the picture below:
Look at the detail of the Bald Eagle's beak! And a tiny dark spot is visible just outside of the eagle's left pupil at the 1:00 position which could be used to identify this eagle in future pictures. Remember, this eagle was so far away from the camera that I had to use a focal length of 2800mm to get this shot.
After the eagle flew away, I returned to my car and ate my lunch hoping that the Bald Eagle would return. And a half hour later, the eagle flew back to the park and landed in the same tree. This time, it was on the other side of the tree, so I had to setup my tripod further away in order to get a direct line of sight.
Here's a picture (it's actually a 4K video screen capture) of the Bald Eagle in the tree taken at a focal length of 24mm:
24mm Focal Length
A focal length of 24mm (plus or minus a few millimeters) is a common focal length for cameras in cell phones. Since the vast majority of people take pictures with their cell phone, that's the picture of the Bald Eagle that most people would get.
Here's the picture of that same Bald Eagle we get without moving the tripod using the Nikon COOLPIX P1100 super zoom camera:
My YouTube video has a video clip of the zoom in to the Bald Eagle from 24mm to 3000mm.
WRAP UP
Well, there you have it. Stumbling upon a Bald Eagle AND having my super zoom camera with me so that I could get these super close-up pictures was nothing short of magical. I think the moral of this story is to always bring your super zoom camera with you wherever you go because you never know what will be waiting there for you.
And here's a recap of the two tips in this article for taking better pictures with the P1100:
- Darkening the highlights and brightening the shadows in your photo editing software can sometimes bring out detail in images that you couldn't previously see.
- Getting everything in focus is increasingly more difficult with super telephoto focal lengths, so consider taking a second picture of the scene at a slightly shorter focal length in case the super telephoto picture is not as sharp as you'd like.
You can watch the video of my magical day with the Bald Eagle and the Nikon P1100 by clicking on the image below.
Thanks for stopping by and reading my article!
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John Miller
is the owner of "One Lens Two" and "In and Around Phoenix". He is also a co-owner of "Fooding Around Phoenix". John is always looking for collaboration opportunities so contact him using one of the options below! 