*** Snowy owl, in a frozen field, far, far, away! Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, Galloway, NJ, 1/10/2014 (Sharing OK) ** For the best, though grainy, experience, click the photo. Then at the upper right, click the slanted double-arrow. Thanks to a text from Dave McClennen, I learned that the Snowy Owl was sighted at Forsythe today. So I joined Dave late afternoon to try to photograph the Snowy Owl. On the way to the owl, we saw lots of frozen water and very few birds. We did see a curious Northern Harrier swinging over the road back and forth. If we weren’t on a Snowy Owl mission, we would have definitely stopped. The owl’s location was easy to find because several others had pulled their cars over to look. We unpacked and set up in the 20 degree weather accompanied by a relentless, icy wind. On occasion, we each had to return to the cars to heat our fingers. Photographically, this was a challenge. The owl was too far for a good photo. The sun was behind the owl, making for terrible lighting. The sun’s position – in my eyes - also made it difficult to see my camera settings. The occasionally foggy glasses (from my breath) didn’t help a whole lot! What an adventure! Most of the time when I looked through the viewfinder, the two concentric focus rectangles made it difficult to see if the owl was looking toward me. I could tell that the head had turned though. So I have a lot of shots of the back of the owl’s head! Of the ones where I could actually see an eye, this is the only one where the yellow coloring was visible in each eye. The photo was extra grainy because I didn’t notice I had accidentally changed the shutter to f/11. That caused the camera to set the ISO to 3200. Yikes! The late suns orange glow on the grass is nice, though. :-) So that’s the story. Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 500 mm F/4L IS II lens, 1.4x Extender III, 1/1600 second, F/11, ISO 3200, from a Gitzo tripod with a Wimberley Gimbal head
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 03:23:43 +0000
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