So we’re here in North Norvic on this quite cool breezy morning, it’s just after dawn and we’re here because this is coastal grazing marsh and I’m thinking this is the good place that I need to start looking for wild Borne Owls hunting, and I’ve already seen one over here in the distance so I’m hoping it’s going to come and feed around these edges fairly soon.
So let’s just run through some basic camera settings, reflect shot like this. Now the camera’s set to ISO 200 which should be fine and this reasonable light and I’m going to be having my lens wide open wide makes some more aperture, f4 in this case, and that would give me a faster shift of speed, 500 to 1000th of a second somewhere in that region which is easily good enough to stop a flight action of a bird like Borne Owl. I’m going to be using continuous Servo Autofocus track the bird as it comes towards me hopefully, and I’ll be using maximum frames per second as well. And the trick with that is to keep it running until it, the focus tracking engages and sometimes that may even mean losing the first few shots as it gets into gear and catches up.
So here in my tripod I’ve got a ball and socket head with wimbled sidekick and the lens mounts onto here so that it balances very well and pivots easily because it may require a little elevation for some bird flying overhead and it’s easily revolved to give me that smooth punch shots where I need them. So the other thing I like about this kind of mount is that the sidekicks slip out quite easily and that thing got a ball and socket head that I can put the camera base on if I want to quickly take a wider shot with the camera attached on the shorter lens, other than I have to carry around to different tripod systems.
A Borne Owl too, I have regular fairly predictable hunting patterns, I like to follow field margins and ditches like this so I’ll just position myself below the reeds, bit of barrier of reeds there, and I think that’ll be enough to let them carry on hunting as normal.
On average, Borne Owls need to eat 4 or 5 small mammals a day, that just adds up to seeming like 1500 a year, quite a lot of food to find, at this time of the year it’s especially important that try to get into breeding condition and it makes it even more like to that we find them out hunting in daylight.
I’m back at home now and I’ve had the chance to download images and review them in the computer. But as I only really want that stands out from the day, the birds not huge in the frame of some, you have them closer in the past, but it’s not bad, habitat’s typical, lighting is nothing special, been nice if it had a larger image but the least of mind is to place the subject of center is flying in to the frame. One thing worth remembering is I caught them with this wings up when he’s hovering and it’s worth remembering that birds has gone trying to fly into the wind most of the time and you can bear this in mind when you’re shooting.
Quite off from with Borne Owl Photography, light’s critical and your working with quite low light levels at dawn are task, but rather unpack and go home, it’s worth experimenting with some slow shoots at speed shots, pan blurs created when you move in the lens with the subject somewhere between 15 to 40th of a second seems to work quite well, cause you have more abstract results but sometimes it fits the mood of the subject. More often than not, bird won’t stay on a perch from the fence post if you try and drive up, but sometimes you just happen to be stopped in the right place as it lands .Capturing your favorite shots of Borne Owl hunting adorn shots and anticipated thought about 2 or 3 weeks in advance and mine is to pick the right morning when those are good breaking dawn, you can see it’s really quite a small subject size but it doesn’t matter because the lighting’s so unusual and particular light away it’s filtering through the bird’s wings. I never tire of seeing hunting Borne Owls and although I photographed them quite a few times now I’ll happily return and do it again and again and try to find new ways to depict them.