Many years ago, a tribal elder entrusted me to take care of this stuffed golden eagle. Years after that, Misty & I were in New Zealand, and Richard Taylor gave us a tour of Weta, the brilliant special effects house, while the Lord of the Rings films were just getting underway.
At one point I asked, "Have you done any of the Great Eagles sequences yet? No? Well, I have this golden eagle back at the studio...."
The tribal elders agreed that it would be a fine way to honor the spirit of the eagle to see it 40 feet wide on a big screen... so began 31 days of photography, mapping, colormatching & imaging every feather on the entire bird. This was then used to surface detail the computer animation models.
This was the very last picture taken out of almost 9 gigabytes of jpgs.