Day 15/365 A peaceful morning

This morning I left the house about 6:15 am and headed out to Horseshoe Lake Park because I saw a picture on Flickr of an eagle out there and thought that might be a cool place to try.  I was hurrying because I wanted to see if I could get some sunrise pictures also.

I really lucked out!  The sunrise was absolutely gorgeous this morning- much prettier than the gray day we're having.  I rode around the park taking tons of pictures of the sunrise from different viewpoints.  I didn't see any eagles around there though, and was a little disappointed in that.

I left Horseshoe park once the sunrise beauty was starting to fade.  I knew that my kids wouldn't be awake yet- it was only about 8:30 am and it's a Saturday morning.  I still had about 2 hours to mess with.

I decided to head back to the Alton area to see if I could see some more eagles this morning.  I've read that the most active times for them are sunrise and sunset because they like to eat at those times.  That must be true because last night's eagle adventures were successful and this morning's as well.  I am very very excited about this picture in particular because it is the clearest one I've gotten thus far:


Not too long after I took this one, the eagle took off and although it's not crisp and clear, I like this shot too:

 I know that this is supposed to be 1 picture a day, but I got too many good shots to just pick one today and wanted to share all of them.

I'm not going to post EXIF information because I don't want to have to look that up for each of these pictures.  When shooting sunrises and eagles, I think that most of the time it's just pure luck when getting a shot instead of settings on a camera anyway.