Great Horned Owl

My sister-in-law told my wife that she saw a Great Horned Owl in a tree in her neighbor’s yard. During the day it mostly just sits way up in the tree and doesn’t move around very much. She wondered if I might be able to get a good picture of it. I was very interested to see if I could get a good picture and, since my wife is an avid bird watcher, she was very interested to see the bird, picture or not. So, we visited my sister-in-law and, sure enough, there was a big old Great Horned Owl just sitting there, apparently waiting for our arrival.

As we moved around to get a better view the owl kept a wary eye on us — two eyes, in fact.  As I did when I took pictures of wood ducks, I used a Canon 1.4x EF Extender III with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM Lens on my Canon 7D.  Because the sun was just off to the side of the tree, I had to put my sun shade on my lens.  Although I brought a tripod, I took pictures hand-held.  I prefer not to be attached to anything as long as there’s adequate light for the situation.  With the lens fully extended it’s 280 mm with a crop factor of 1.6x.  The ISO was set to 400 and I used an exposure of 1/500 at f/5.6.

7D-3426a

I was pleased with the results. The eyes and feathers were quite sharp and the sunlight streaming through the leaves added some interesting color to the image. The lighting did leave the front of the bird in shadow but I was able to pull in out while processing in Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6.

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