Burrowing Owl – Same Bird, Same Perch, Different Angle

I’d like to make a point with this post.  It’s one that every experienced bird photographer knows on some level but in the heat of the moment (it can be very exciting getting close to a “good” bird in nice light) it’s one that is easily forgotten.  I’m getting much better at remembering but I still slip up occasionally.

The point?  Very minor changes in your shooting position can make huge differences (positive, negative or indifferent) in your photo.  I’ll illustrate that point with a couple of shots that I took this morning.  They’re not my best Burrowing Owl images but they’ll serve their purpose here.

 1/160, f/7.1, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in

This morning we think we found a new (to us) Burrowing Owl burrow right next to the road on Antelope Island that we’ve probably driven by several hundred times and never noticed.  We don’t know for sure that it’s an owl burrow because we didn’t get out of the pickup and go tromping all over the area to inspect it.  And right next to it was this juvenile owl, perched on a sagebrush, where we’d never seen an owl before.  It had been cloudy but some light had begun peeking through a “crack” in the clouds when this shot was taken.

It’s a “busy” perch and when the sun began to come out the bird was sidelit so I decided to change my position slightly…

 1/320, f/7.1, ISO 640, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in

so I backed up (I shoot from my pickup) perhaps 20 feet.

That small change of position transformed the shot completely.  The bird is now lit from the front instead of the side, there’s dried vegetation in the background instead of water, I have a side view of the owl instead of a frontal view and the perch looks like a completely different sagebrush than it did in the first image.  In fact, it seems like the owl must have moved after the first shot but I’m almost positive that it didn’t so much as wiggle a toe.  The images were taken two minutes apart.

But dagnab it, I sure wish that one sagebrush sprig wasn’t in front of the face and shoulder!  And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t even notice it in the field – only when I got home and started reviewing images.  Soooo many things to be cognizant of when you’re “out there” shooting…

I think it’s kind of interesting to compare the two images.  For example, that blasted sagebrush sprig in front of the face in the second shot can be seen to the left of the bird in the first image.

Ron