Birds are great sub­jects. They are plen­ti­ful and col­or­ful. They are fleet­ing which make still pic­tures of them chal­leng­ing and all the more appre­ci­at­ed. A friend recent­ly showed me a pic­ture of a great horned owl tak­en just a short walk from my home and I real­ized I need­ed owl pic­tures of my own.

2 owls live in the euca­lyp­tus grove right down the street. I can hear them hoot­ing as I type this. They do not seem much afraid of us and often sit rather close to an access­able path. They also sit very still. This is an advan­tage as I am shoot­ing them in late evening light and in deep shad­ows. With the aper­ture wide open, I am using 1/10th of a sec­ond or slow­er shut­ter speed.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, we have a male and female. The male being the small­er of the two and with a low­er pitched song. All the hoot­ing may be courtship rit­u­als in progress. If so, they would build a nest and lit­tle owls would appear in the ear­ly spring. All in all, an excel­lent pho­to doc­u­men­tary oppor­tu­ni­ty and blog wor­thy too.

If I am cor­rect, in the pic­tures above, the first is the male. The sec­ond, the female, is not wink­ing at me. She appears to have lost her right eye.

I will be pho­tograph­ing them as often as I am able. I am using a Nikon D80 with a Nikkor 70–300 4.8/5.6 lens usu­al­ly cranked out to 300mm and still requir­ing some extreme crop­ping. Using a tri­pod and remote trig­ger helps. Focus­ing through the branch­es is anoth­er chal­lenge. I hope to score some great shots going for­ward and post­ing them here.

This was my first shot and hand held at that! He was sit­ting in a great loca­tion.