As I hopped on my computer tonight to shut it down I decided to hop on the old Facebook to see what was going on and I came across someone asking a question about using intentional camera movement in a shot, and knowing I had a couple goode examples of it I opened up my Lightroom and found the photo and shared it with him.
This post isn't about that photo though. I ended looking at some other photos from that same night of shooting and I came across this photo of a great horned owl that I took, here's the story of that.
I was at my in-laws cabin a few summers back taking photos of the aspen trees at sunset and blue hour and I could hear a great horned owl hooting just up the hill. It was a common occurrence at the cabin and I'd never really been able to get a photo of him, so since I had my camera and my longest lens out I figured I'd try to get a photo.
I could see him sitting in the top of a tree atop the hill so I slowly made my way up the hill, stopping every so often to let him get used to my presence and taking some photos at extremely high ISO just to see if they'd turn out (spoiler, they did not). I finally got into a range that I knew I could get an ok photo at 200mm and crop in like mad on my 42MP Sony A7RIII, even if it was just a silhouette.
I ended up taking a ton of photos at different settings just to get the best image. A fast shutter speed and high ISO and it was too grainy, too slow of a shutter speed and lower ISO and the owl would move and be blurry. My lens has a max aperture of f/4 so not a stellar low light performer.
I was just lucky enough for a few shots to get the bird not moving for a 4 second exposure with an ISO of 640. I think what's especially cool is that you can see the stars out of focus in the sky, which gives you an idea of how dark it was when I shot this.
cropped and edited
straight out of camera
