Tag: composition

Barn Owl Hunting Over A Hoarfrosted Hill

The Barn Owls are still hunting sporadically during daylight in northern Utah.  I’ve seen them doing so in a variety of areas and heard reports of it happening elsewhere. Some areas near the Great Salt Lake are literally “magical wonderlands” in the early mornings due to the thick layer of hoarfrost that covers nearly everything.  The frost falls off the vegetation during the day, then reforms during the night.  The hoarfrost produces a setting for my images that appeals to me. The camera settings for the images in this post were: 1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4.  The owl was not baited, set up or called in.    Yesterday morning this owl was hunting along the upper edge of a steep-sided hill as it came in my general direction and then rounded the hill to my right.  In the first four shots you can see that its attention is riveted to the side of the hill where the snow cover is much less deep than it is everywhere else, which would increase the chances of spotting a vole. I chose to compose these images a little differently so that the frost-covered hunting ground becomes almost as important to the image as the bird.  If you have any thoughts on this composition I’d be interested in hearing them.     As the bird rounded the hilltop and got closer to me the frosted vegetation became more dominant in the images.     You can see that the snow on the hillside is patchy (most of the white is frost) so I believe that…

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A Compositional Conundrum

I intended this post to be a single image for my “Just A Shot That I Like” feature.  It didn’t turn out that way. Six days ago I found this Great Blue Heron on the edge of a small, partially frozen creek with an almost vertical snow bank directly behind and very close to the bird.  The heron was patient with me and I was close so I tried a variety of compositions using my 500 mm and 100-400 mm lenses.  The incredibly fast shutter speeds were because of the bright snow and my forgetfulness in adjusting settings as I was juggling two cameras and lenses. In the end I couldn’t decide which composition I preferred so I’m presenting three of them here.      1/5000, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4, natural light  This relatively tight vertical shows good detail on the bird and I like the close view of the swirly marks on the snow behind the heron made by a wing as it landed.       1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, 100 – 400 @ 400mm, natural light Some folks gravitate toward whole-bird reflections so I’m also including this composition.  Ideally I’d prefer the bird to be slightly further left in the frame but cropping off the left makes the image too narrow vertically for my tastes and I have no more room on the right (image was taken vertically and is close to full frame).     1/6400, f/5.6, ISO 640, 100 – 400 @ 400mm, natural light A horizontal composition with the heron slightly smaller in the frame shows more of the…

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Frosty Northern Harrier

This is a shot that I like, partly due to the somewhat unusual effects of the light and the resulting colors.    1/1250, f/8, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, shot from pickup window, not baited, set up or called in It was taken on a very cold January morning (notice the frosty perch) just as the sun was coming up over the Wasatch mountains and the warm colors from the very low sun, combined with the light bouncing off all of the Phragmites in the area, gave the overall image a bit of a slightly unusual color that appeals to me (as usual, I made no color adjustments during processing).     After my last post on composition it seems that I’m fretting about cropping options even more than I usually do.  I often try several versions, make a decision, then use (or post) just the one I think I like best.  But in this instance I just wasn’t sure, so I decided to post two versions.   Typically, my gut instinct is to go for the tighter crop (the vertical in this case) because of the better detail on the bird, but I’m trying to expand my horizons a little and become more flexible with the options I consider. If you have a preference between these two images I’d love to hear about it, but please don’t think you need to choose one over the other if you decide to comment on the image. And this will be the last time (at least for a good long…

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Compositional Mind Games

There are times when I really struggle with composition when I’m cropping an image.  To a degree, composition is a matter of taste and personal preference, though most folks would agree on a few major principles.  Some of those might be: avoid clipping body parts or cropping too tight on the subject the subject usually (though not always) should not be centered in the frame leave plenty of room in the  frame in the direction the subject is facing, looking or flying (in the case of birds) Where I sometimes run into difficulty making a composition decision is when there are other compositional elements in the image that I might like to include in the final version of the photo.  Thanks largely to the influence of Richard Ditch, I’ve become fond of strong graphic lines in some of my images, as long as those lines come from natural or rustic elements (power poles or wires just won’t cut it with me). This summer I photographed a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk on an old, rustic pole fence in Beaverhead County, Montana and I’m having a very difficult time making cropping decisions on some of those images.  My natural tendency is to crop fairly tightly on the bird to get good detail on the subject but I also like the graphic lines provided by the fence with different cropping choices.  Several times I’ve thought I’d finally figured out which version I prefer, but when I came back to the computer a few hours later and looked at them one more time I was again undecided.  Compositional mind…

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The Regal Ring-necked Pheasant

The Ring-necked Pheasant is a species I’ve always enjoyed (something I can’t say about many other introduced species).   The colors of the males are spectacular and their mating antics in springtime are a lot of fun to watch and to attempt to photograph.  Fighting males really go at each other.    1/640, f/9, ISO 400, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light One of the  biggest problems with photographing them is composition – that ridiculously long tail is just so difficult to fit into the frame and still get a composition that works well if you’re close enough to get nice detail.  The other issue is catching them in the clear – these birds prefer habitat that usually has lots of obstructing vegetation in front of the bird.  But when you find one of them in the open and have nice light on the bird, their colors certainly catch the eye.      1/400, f/8, ISO 400, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light  Males like to crow at the sun as it rises, which is exactly what this bird was doing.  He’s sidelit and facing slightly away from me but this angle gave me light in the eye and I like the strutting pose.      1/800, f/8, ISO 500, 500 5/4, 1.4 tc, natural light Occasionally, especially on cold mornings, these pheasants will perch in trees in order to make best use of the warming rays of the sun.  This is one of the few times I’ve photographed this species in a tree where there weren’t a lot of obstructing branches…

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