Photo by Paul Bennett
A lovely Long Eared Owl
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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For owls that are superb.
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You seem to know what you want and you enjoy doing it, so I'd call that successful.
Do you share any of your pics online?
Another "I want to, but...". The places to realistically do that are basically sites like instagram that I see as actively malicious. I'll get to the point of just hosting myself on my own hardware to make visible to people who care, but definitely not promoting or anything. I just have a bad habit of stacking up too many other things to develop simultaneously, then doing none of them to read a book or play video games or do one of the different outdoor things I want to do instead.
But if you're curious I can throw a couple here. (And this post won't load for me after because my app can't parse multiple images in a post lol.
There. Splitting them into posts doesn't crash I guess.
It only put up one with a pair of butterflies. I like it though. All the appendages stand out nicely and you see some details of the eyes. The one flying is also nice and clear looking.
I live near some water, and it would be cool to catch some of the dragonflies like this to get a nice look at them.
Edit: Now I see you broke them out. And you even had a dragonfly! I like that and that fuzzy little bee face too. I've been trying to post better attention to all the unique bee types we have as well.
I made it a chain of replies with one per post instead so my whole app doesn't crash every time I open it. One of the others actually is a dragonfly. Huge pain in the ass because of how fast they move, and because they're too small for my autofocus (that's also probably too slow). But really satisfying when you get a clean one (though I definitely had to massage that one in post).
I found ~f/10 with as fast a shutter as you can get away with is your best bet to get a clear shot with a decent chunk in focus. More open than that and the plane in focus is just too narrow for me to get anything.
I did see, I went back and corrected my post once I saw the others.
Nature photography seems to present a lot of challenges as you pointed out earlier. You only can carry so much equipment and you have a subject with no interest in cooperating that can move at any moment. It makes it all the more impressive, even to get less than ideal shots.
There's also a lot less owls, that are a lot harder to find than dragonflies.
I have shots I like, but they're pretty much all reasonably common animals because that's what I have access to, mostly in my back yard. Or flowers I mostly grew, or whatever. Getting an owl, especially doing cool stuff like that, adds the whole element of actually finding the right spot where they live and play, etc. It's a whole additional layer of work involved.