Photographing A Barn Owl On His Autumn Perch

I had signed up for a Hawkquest photo shoot in the summer but when it got postponed to the fall, I had a feeling that would work out just fine. As... more

by Mike Berenson

Title

Photographing A Barn Owl On His Autumn Perch

Artist

Mike Berenson

Medium

Photograph

Description

I had signed up for a Hawkquest photo shoot in the summer but when it got postponed to the fall, I had a feeling that would work out just fine. As it worked out, the turning leaves in Bear Creek Lake Park made the scene come alive with fall-time colors!

Here, I was able to catch an image of a Barn Owl on his perch - showing off the glowing autumn colors of Bear Creek Lake Park in Lakewood, Colorado.

How I Got The Shot
Having been to a Hawkquest photo shoot before and having caught some great images, I knew what an opportunity this was. So when I saw a posting in the Front Range Photography Meetup group for an event with Hawkquest, I knew to jump on it. I ended up postponing once and then they did once as well but that put it right into the fall foliage which worked out great!

One of the things that's unique with these photo-shoots is that they give photographers a chance to shoot the birds much closer than they normally would. Of course, there are limits on how close you can get, but I found this to be a great opportunity to use my macro lens that I've gotten good results with handheld thanks in part to the lens' vibration reduction. Anyway, this lens gave me a good chance to get close to get good details with a soft, creamy bokeh.

Once I picked my lens, I looked for opportunities to show off the birds without having their leather jesses (attached to their feet) being visible. To do this, I often avoided looking at the birds straight ahead and got into position where they looked over their shoulder toward me. This approach worked especially well with the Barn Owl.

I also looked carefully for positions that would give me the best vantage point on some fall foliage and dancing leaves in the background. In trying both sides of the Barn Owl's perch, this was clearly the winning perspective. Fortunately, the owl was happy to follow me (with his eyes) as I got into position so I had an easy time including the owl looking right at me.
In terms of settings, I looked to keep the aperture down low to get the creamy autumn background. This meant running a little higher ISO to keep the shutter speed fast enough for a hand-held image.

Photo Gear
� Camera Body - Nikon D800 Digital SLR Camera
� Camera Lens - Nikon AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED Lens
� Handheld with no tripod!

Exposure Settings - Single Exposure Image
� ISO: 800
� Aperture: f/3.0
� Shutter Speed: 1/800 second

Post-Processing
As this image was not a composite image but rather a single exposure image, it didn't need much in the way of post-processing. In photoshop, I gave it a couple of subtle adjustment layers with some using a mask to target the adjustment to either the background or the owl. I applied Tony Kuyper's "Make It Glow" action to the background with some pleasing results when I dropped the opacity of the filtered layer to 75%. Then using a similar technique, I added an unsharpen mask filter to a copy of the background to bring out some details and then added a mask to make sure that only the owl got sharpened - not the background.

More Information: http://www.hawkquest.org

Uploaded

January 18th, 2014