A few more Short-eared Owl images

Incoming Short-eared Owl. The last thing that a Meadow Vole wants to look up and see. As the light was fairly horrific yet the owling was great, I looked forward to a return visit to the site in the previous post. So, after seeing reports of breaking skies and some sunshine towards day's end Wednesday (12/27/2023), Shauna Weyrauch and I headed to Owlsville. The owls certainly didn't disappoint but the weather (and its forecasters) did. The predictions were way off base, and it was misty, foggy, and skies were even darker than during the preceding trip.

Such conditions made photography tough, but who cares? Numerous short-eared worked the fields, and at least as many Northern Harriers. There were many hostile interactions between the owls, and owls and harriers. At times, the angry terrier-like barks and low screams of owls rang out everywhere, mixed with the shrill whistles of the harriers. Not to mention the observation of a vole-caching, as described in the previous post. Just watching the action is great fun.

A Short-eared Owl glares (menacingly? it doesn't look too menacing, but I'm not a vole) at the camera. As sunset approached and the light grew even worse, we headed down the road to see how many owls we could tally, not thinking that any additional photography would bear fruit. We didn't get far before encountering the individual above, perched obliging at eye level and very near the road. The bird cared not a whit about our presence and continued surveilling for other owls, and harriers, while presumably also watching for voles. I got the vehicle into a good position, killed the engine and we began shooting out the windows.

It became apparent that the owl wasn't concerned with us. These owls are fairly tame, but this individual was unusually so. As the light was now really poor, we began playing with much lower shutter speeds to keep the ISO down. Shauna had it best as the owl happened to be on her side of the vehicle and she could use the door as a de facto tripod and brace her rig on the sill while using the vehicle as a blind of sorts.

PHOTO NOTES: Eventually I decided to slowly, quietly and carefully exit the vehicle, get my tripod out, and mount the rig on that. No issues, the owl didn't react. Thus stabilized, I was able to drop my shutter speed WAY down and still obtain sharp images. The image above was shot at 1/50 of a second at f/5.6, which gave an ISO of 1250. My Canon R5 handles higher ISOs well, and 1250 isn't too tough on it, and applying Topaz Denoise later helped clean up the image even more. Other than occasional turns of its head, the owl didn't move, so as long as I didn't fire while it was turning its head the bird might as well have been a feathered rock, especially as there was no wind. The previous image - of the same owl - was shot at 1/400 at f/5.6 (that aperture is wide-open on my Canon 800 lens) and that yielded an ISO of 1/5000. That image was made earlier in the sequence, before I bottomed out at 1/50. It is decidedly "noisier" than the image directly above, but it isn't too apparent as not much cropping was required.

Naturally the first image had to be at a much higher shutter speed, to freeze the flying bird. I went as low as I felt that I could work with and still obtain sharp images, which was 1,250 of a second. Again, at f/5.6 (I shot everything wide open on this dim later afternoon) and that produced an ISO of 10000. FAR higher than I like but there was nothing to be done about it. Fortunately, the bird came very near, and I got my shot when it was quite close, thus eliminating the need for heavy cropping which greatly intensifies noise caused by high ISO values.

In hindsight regarding the perched bird, I should have switched to 2-second timer delay and used touch screen focus. By doing so, I could have just touched the rear screen where the owl's head was (ALWAYS want eyes to be sharp). The touch would trigger the shot sequence to commence, and two seconds later the camera would fire, after any slight movement I might have caused while touching the camera to set focus would have stopped. About the only thing that could go awry is if the owl moved during my exposure, but if so, I would just retake another. By doing this, I could have experimented with exposures as low as 1/30 or 1/25, maybe even 1/10, and thus dropped the ISO much more while probably still managing sharp photos.