Little owl

[dennis greenwood]

Following on from my last little owl image were I was given a few pointers on trying to get the bird looking at me with the mouse ,not as easy as I thought it would be as the bird no matter what angle I went for with a perch being vertical or horizontal the bird would always grab and turn in the direction it was going to leave with the mouse ,tonight though I thought I would try something different with the way I get the shots ,and it worked as it stopped around long enough to be curious as to what happened just a second earlier ,it was enough to grab its attention as to were the noise had come from ,this was the best of just a few I got as apposed to loads with the bird looking to the right ,take with a 1d mkiv and 300mm iso 400 F4 1/500 sec +2/3 EV Little owl 21st september by den9112, on Flickr

[Randy Stout]

Dennis:

Nice sense of form provided by the soft but directional light. Great eye contact, mouse a plus.

If IQ will hold up, I would consider a version with crop from left and top. Diagonal perch a def. plus.

Cheers

Randy

[Daniel Cadieux]

I love that pose and the way it is clutching the mouse! Excellent perch and BG, nice light too. I like the crop as is. Only improvements I could suggest is to tone down the brightest part of the BG underneath the perch, plus the legs, and perhaps lighten the darker eye.

Just being curious...what did you do "different" to get the image you envisioned?

[dennis greenwood]

Thanks for taking time to comment ,after trying different sounds to get the birds attention ........and I have tried many over the years the tool that did the job was my Gitzo rocket blower from inside my hide ,other sounds just cause the bird to freeze then fly off ,I have tried squeaks ,clicks you name it but me blowing just just a few millimetres from inside the material causing a slight bellow kept the birds attention by looking my way and these birds have excellent hearing

[John Robinson]

Interesting stuff dennis
I usually find scratching the hide material is enough. ! At one stage I had to wiggle my feet out the bottom of the hide but then they were all shots of the bird looking down !!
JOhn