Photo by Paul Bennett
A lovely Long Eared Owl
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
223 points (100.0% liked)
Superbowl
2916 readers
580 users here now
For owls that are superb.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.