Long Eared Owlet

[Paul Kammen]

Was fortunate enough to view a long eared owls nest in Yellowstone National Park recently; the young ones are branching and walking around. Here's one of him slightly above me.

Canon 7D2, 100-400 @ 180 mm, f/7.1, 1/250, ISO 400, Tv mode, fill flash

[Doug Brown]

Hey Paul. Very cool to have a close encounter with a Long-eared Owlet! I like the eye contact you got from the bird. You'll notice that I added the EXIF data to your post; it's recommended that you include it with all image posts to help with the technical side of image critique. I see a few issues with this photo that I'd like to point out. First of all your zone of best focus seems to be the tail feathers and talons rather than the eyes. Second, it looks like you were shooting in dappled sunlight but you did not control your whites (not an easy task in camera, but potentially fixable in post processing). You might try using the camera exposure to bring down the whites and use flash exposure to light up the bird. Also, whenever I see a shutter speed of 1/250 while using flash I wonder if high speed sync was not enabled during the exposure.

Hopefully you got more frames of this LEO that you'll share with us.

[arash_hazeghi]

Nice post Pual TFS. Doug covered the techs. You has a very tough situation here with harsh light, busy BG and the steep angle. I wonder if the owl ever goes to a different perch where conditions are a bit better for photography.

TFS

[Arthur Morris]

Hi Paul and welcome. As above, the off-angled mixed sun and shade are death to most images taken in those conditions. Here is another suggestion that might help: use One-Shot or Rear Focus AF to focus on the eyes...

a