November 29
Good Morning
I was picking up supplies at Staples yesterday when I received a phone call from a bird photographer friend. He is a North Saw-whet Owl whisperer and has several secret locations that he checks on regularly. He had located one and graciously invited me to come photograph it. He advised that I wouldn’t need a big lens as it was quite approachable.
So I met him and off we went. When we got to the location, he went off the trail to a tree, bent over and peered under some branches, There, perched on a branch but completely hidden from view at eye level was a Saw-whet Owl. Saw-whet Owls are only 8 inches long and weighs 2.8 oz (80g). They are fierce predators and are nocturnal so they are very hard to find. You can sometimes hear them at night as they make their whistled toots that sound like heavy equipment backing up.
I took some shots with my 100-400mm lens and then decided to use my 500mm lens to capture a really close-up image.
The first image is a 3 wide x 3 high composite of the owl and its surrounding. I took the nine photos and put them together. The result is a 416 mb file that twice as many pixels as a normal image
The second image is zooms in on the face image image and really shows the feather detail nicely, Like most owls, the skull extends just past the edge or the eyes, The feathers that form the dish around its ears to amplify sound double the size of its face.
It was an exciting day and i had some challenging post work to create the composite image.
This will be my last early morning image for a while. Connor switched to on-line schooling for the next four weeks, so there will be no need to get up at 6:30 a.m. until mid January!
Stay well !
