lpammann
10-26-2011, 11:31 PM
I'm fortunate to live near some wooded areas that support several owls and hawks. This has enabled me to see and photograph these beautiful birds in their natural habitats many times. I wanted to share some of the things I've learned about owl photography in particular. Disclaimer: I certainly am no expert about birds, but this represents what has worked for me.
Finding owls:
The best time to start looking for owls is around 30 minutes before sunset. As I walk through the woods searching for an owl, I stop every once in a while and look behind me. I may have missed seeing one at first, or one may have flown silently to a perch behind me. That has happened many times and I've been able to get quite a few shots I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Owls have a discomfort zone which will cause them to fly off if I enter it. If the owl is staring at me, then I know I'm too close and need to move back. If he looks at me briefly but then looks elsewhere, I'm outside his discomfort zone. I try to remind myself that this is a large-bodied bird who is looking for food and must expend energy to fly. I don't want to cause him to feel that I'm a threat that causes him to fly away. The best analogy I can think of is to imagine being very hungry and being required to swim a lap in an olympic pool doing the butterfly stroke before I can eat.
If the owl has a very large discomfort zone and flies off while I'm still fairly far away, then there is no point in continuing and I need to look elsewhere for another owl. If I can approach close enough to take some photographs, I don't want to be greedy, so I just take a few shots and then move away. That is hard to do, but I want the owl to be comfortable with my presence so I'll have a good chance to get more shots another day.
Equipment:
Camera: Owls are a challenge to photograph in their habitat because they are almost always in deep shadows. This requires a camera that is capable of good image quality when shooting at high ISO. I shoot with a Pentax K5 and routinely use ISO 1600-3200 for owls. There may be a temptation to use a flash to counteract the relatively dim light an owl sits in, but that would be counter-productive. All a flash will produce is the mother of all red-eyes. Owls have much more sensitive eyes than ours, so a flash will be many times more irritating to an owl which will cause him to fly away and have a much greater discomfort zone than he had before.
Lens:
Also because of the dim light, a fairly fast lens is needed, f/4 or faster. To minimize disturbance to the owl and keep his discomfort zone from growing larger, I want to use a lens that I can easily hand-hold. I don't like to use a monopod because it is difficult to aim halfway up a tree with one, and it may create too much commotion. Also, the lens should have a silent focus mechanism. If your lens does not focus silently, then you should use manual focus. You don't want to generate any strange sounds which will cause the owl's discomfort zone to expand. I use a Pentax DA*300. The 300mm focal length is long enough for the distance I can get to these owls, given the 1.5x crop factor of the K5's sensor. Its f/4 aperture is sufficiently fast for the ISO range the K5 is capable of handling. A 300mm f/2.8 lens would be faster, but such a lens would be much heavier and would likely need at least a monopod to get sharp images. Because hand-holding lets me maneuver more easily, having image stabilization in the lens or in the camera body is very helpful. The K5 has in-body image stabilization, so every lens I use will be image stabilized.
Post-Processing:
To have the most flexibility for creating the final image, the camera should be setup to shoot in raw mode. Since I'm shooting using available light and my subject is in deep shade with reddened light as the sun sets, attaining proper white balance is very difficult to achieve using Auto WB. Ordinarily, shade requires higher temperature for WB, but sunset requires lower temperature. Shooting in raw gives me the ability to manually adjust white balance for each shot. I convert the raw image file to a 16-bit TIFF file which I then finish using Photoshop or other image processing program. Since I'm using high ISO for owl shots, I use a noise reduction program, Topaz Labs DeNoise5, before I do any brightness adjustments to minimize noise artifacts without losing detail. My last post-processing step is to apply a small amount of high-pixel radius unsharp mask. This may seem counter-intuitive, but try USM with radius of 50, amount 10-15%, and threshold 1, to see that this increases local color contrast. For web display, I reduce the image mode to 8-bit and save a downsized copy as a jpeg image.
Hope this helps. Good Luck.
Larry
Finding owls:
The best time to start looking for owls is around 30 minutes before sunset. As I walk through the woods searching for an owl, I stop every once in a while and look behind me. I may have missed seeing one at first, or one may have flown silently to a perch behind me. That has happened many times and I've been able to get quite a few shots I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Owls have a discomfort zone which will cause them to fly off if I enter it. If the owl is staring at me, then I know I'm too close and need to move back. If he looks at me briefly but then looks elsewhere, I'm outside his discomfort zone. I try to remind myself that this is a large-bodied bird who is looking for food and must expend energy to fly. I don't want to cause him to feel that I'm a threat that causes him to fly away. The best analogy I can think of is to imagine being very hungry and being required to swim a lap in an olympic pool doing the butterfly stroke before I can eat.
If the owl has a very large discomfort zone and flies off while I'm still fairly far away, then there is no point in continuing and I need to look elsewhere for another owl. If I can approach close enough to take some photographs, I don't want to be greedy, so I just take a few shots and then move away. That is hard to do, but I want the owl to be comfortable with my presence so I'll have a good chance to get more shots another day.
Equipment:
Camera: Owls are a challenge to photograph in their habitat because they are almost always in deep shadows. This requires a camera that is capable of good image quality when shooting at high ISO. I shoot with a Pentax K5 and routinely use ISO 1600-3200 for owls. There may be a temptation to use a flash to counteract the relatively dim light an owl sits in, but that would be counter-productive. All a flash will produce is the mother of all red-eyes. Owls have much more sensitive eyes than ours, so a flash will be many times more irritating to an owl which will cause him to fly away and have a much greater discomfort zone than he had before.
Lens:
Also because of the dim light, a fairly fast lens is needed, f/4 or faster. To minimize disturbance to the owl and keep his discomfort zone from growing larger, I want to use a lens that I can easily hand-hold. I don't like to use a monopod because it is difficult to aim halfway up a tree with one, and it may create too much commotion. Also, the lens should have a silent focus mechanism. If your lens does not focus silently, then you should use manual focus. You don't want to generate any strange sounds which will cause the owl's discomfort zone to expand. I use a Pentax DA*300. The 300mm focal length is long enough for the distance I can get to these owls, given the 1.5x crop factor of the K5's sensor. Its f/4 aperture is sufficiently fast for the ISO range the K5 is capable of handling. A 300mm f/2.8 lens would be faster, but such a lens would be much heavier and would likely need at least a monopod to get sharp images. Because hand-holding lets me maneuver more easily, having image stabilization in the lens or in the camera body is very helpful. The K5 has in-body image stabilization, so every lens I use will be image stabilized.
Post-Processing:
To have the most flexibility for creating the final image, the camera should be setup to shoot in raw mode. Since I'm shooting using available light and my subject is in deep shade with reddened light as the sun sets, attaining proper white balance is very difficult to achieve using Auto WB. Ordinarily, shade requires higher temperature for WB, but sunset requires lower temperature. Shooting in raw gives me the ability to manually adjust white balance for each shot. I convert the raw image file to a 16-bit TIFF file which I then finish using Photoshop or other image processing program. Since I'm using high ISO for owl shots, I use a noise reduction program, Topaz Labs DeNoise5, before I do any brightness adjustments to minimize noise artifacts without losing detail. My last post-processing step is to apply a small amount of high-pixel radius unsharp mask. This may seem counter-intuitive, but try USM with radius of 50, amount 10-15%, and threshold 1, to see that this increases local color contrast. For web display, I reduce the image mode to 8-bit and save a downsized copy as a jpeg image.
Hope this helps. Good Luck.
Larry