"When a Plan comes Together"

[David Salem]

Looks like it's Owl week!!
I just had a great owl experiance a few days ago so this looks like a perfect time to post one from that outing.
A non-photographer friend of mine had called me to inform me that he knew were a group of burrowing owls were. He said that he wasn't sure what orginazation had done it, but they were transplanted to this location.
A few days later I decided to go look for them in the evening. Using his directions, 15 poles down the dirt road and turn left before the river bank, I eventually found the location. There were 4-5 man made burrows and I saw a total of 5 owls, 4 adults and one baby.
The temp was very hot that evening and all the shots I took were full of heat shimmer and unusable. I did get one pretty good flight shot of the baby though. The shots wouldn't have been any good anyway because the perches they had for the owls were regular wood construction stakes and white PVC poles.
I told my buddy Glenn about the find and the lack of perches so we decided to go to search for sutable perches. I knew a spot that had a few Cholla cactus and we were hoping to find some dried out pieces for perches. They look really cool and give that south west desert look.
We found some nice perches and headed out to the owls. We zip tied them to the existing stakes and hung around for about an hour to see what they would do. As expected they were weary of them and did't use them so we left and planed on coming back on Sunday morning.
We showed up at 6am Sunday and within a few minutes we saw a few owls using our perches. Killer!!
We setup on this perch and this nice male landed in front of us. We were stoked getting great shots of him with perfect light and a killer BG. Just when we thought it couldn't get any better, Jr. jumps up on the perch with his dad!!
Needless to say we were laughing at our fortunate situation and the baby gave us 10 minutes on the perch with a few different poses. It was way better than we expected or could have hoped for.
This image shows that with a little forethought, insight and planning, you can achieve the images you are looking for!!
The long time personal joke between Glenn and I when we get something good is "You can't get images like this on the couch"
Get out there and get some good ones!!

D5---840mm---f6.3---ss1/2500th---ISO1000---Handheld from truck---30% crop---cloned band

Thanks as always for looking and for your input. I appreciate it.

David