Photo by Paul Bennett
A lovely Long Eared Owl
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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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.
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.