Great Horned Owl on the roof of Tess Morgan. iPhone photo from the parking lot.
Yesterday my dog and I were on our daily tour of our local lakes. We got an unusually late start and it was after sunset when we left the first lake. We were in a hurry to get to our second lake when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop corner of Tess Morgan, a college campus building. From a distance it looked like a vent pipe, but a vent pipe should not be located at the corner of the roof. To get a lot closer, I pulled into the parking for a better look. I am so glad I did. It was an owl (photo above).
My “go everywhere” inexpensive toy camera was with me and had a 55-250mm lens attached and ready to go (on the right in the photo below). It is a good idea to have a camera ready to go because you never know when you might need it. The small camera bag also has a wide angle lens and a normal lens, but when you need a camera “Right Now!” the odds are good that you will need a telephoto lens on the camera. Wildlife can be elusive. Landscapes don’t usually run away.
You never know when an animal will spook and take off, so I took my first few photos of the owl while sitting in my car in the parking lot. Then I got out and took some more. I moved a little closer and took some more photos. Closer still, and more photos. The owl kept a close eye on me. Eventually I was as close to the owl as I could get without shooting straight up.
Canon 7D Mark II with a Canon EF 100-400mm lens on the left. Canon SL3 with a Canon EFS 55-250mm lens on the right.
After doing the best job I could with the gear I had with me, I went back home, grabbed my best wildlife camera and a 100-400mm lens (on the left in the photo above) and went back.
Great Horned Owl on the Tess Morgan roof.
I walked right up to my prior owl shooting location to take some more photos. The Great Horned Owl was so used to me by now that it had shut its eyes. I had to talk to it to get it to open its eyes. I did everything but sing and dance to get a selection of images with its eyes open. I missed some good shots when it closed it eyes. Eyelids don’t make for great images. I have never been this close to a Great Horned Owl in the wild. Thanks to this chance occurrence, I captured my first and best Great Horned Owl images.
Not all of the images were sharp. The light level was low, so I had the ISO cranked up to 2500. My shutter speed for the handheld camera was 1/100 second. I prefer to handhold this lens at 1/500 second. The image stabilized lens helped a lot. The owl would also blink so I lost some shots due to closed eyelids. I took a lot of photos (a total of 66) between 7:49 and 7:56 pm to make sure some of them were sharp.
Exposure Info: Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm lens at 400mm. f/8, 1/100 second, ISO 2500.