{"id":104439,"date":"2021-11-26T05:55:30","date_gmt":"2021-11-26T12:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=104439"},"modified":"2021-11-26T07:49:33","modified_gmt":"2021-11-26T14:49:33","slug":"a-female-short-eared-owl-up-close-in-thick-fog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/26\/a-female-short-eared-owl-up-close-in-thick-fog\/","title":{"rendered":"A Female Short-eared Owl Up Close In Thick Fog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting quality photos of a bird in thick fog is tricky but under the right conditions it can be done.<\/span><\/p>\n

Each of the following photos was taken during a camping trip to Montana’s Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in mid-September of 2010.<\/p>\n

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\"lower<\/p>\n

This is the entrance to the refuge with the marshes on the east side of Lower Red Rock Lake visible in the middle background. Most of the lake proper is out of frame to the left. Back then on our trips to the refuge we always camped on the shore of the lake and that’s where I parked my camping trailer on this trip.<\/p>\n

That time of year nighttime temperatures are typically moderately to very cold (the refuge is very close to the continental divide and after all, this is Montana) so the relatively warm lake interfacing with the cold air often fills the lower parts of the huge valley with thick lake fog by dawn.<\/p>\n

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This is what it looked like at our campsite on one of the mornings of that trip as the sun was rising over the lake and we were leaving to look for birds. This fog actually isn’t all that thick. On some mornings there’s no hint of the sun at all through the dense lake fog.<\/p>\n

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1\/1000, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

On another morning of that trip the lake fog was so thick I could barely see the dirt road as we were leaving at dawn so I had to just creep along. A few minutes later, as I was about to drive over a cattle guard with a fence corner just a few feet from the road, we spotted the ghostly apparition of this female Short-eared Owl perched on one of the fence posts. By the time we spotted her through the fog she was so close I had to remove my teleconverter and shoot vertically to keep all of her in frame. Even then I was a little too close to give her as much room in the frame as I like.<\/p>\n

Without the fog there isn’t a chance in hell that she would have allowed me so close but the fog gave her such a sense of security that she wasn’t nervous one little bit.<\/p>\n

Fog can seem almost like a living, breathing entity as its thickness waxes and wanes. When I took this shot the fog was so dense its effects are quite visible, even at this very close range.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/1250, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But just a few seconds earlier it wasn’t quite as thick so this shot shows more detail than the previous one. Another evidence of the somewhat better light is my slightly increased shutter speed using the same camera settings.<\/p>\n

I don’t often get photos of birds in thick fog that I like very much but I like this one a lot.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

A tight crop on her face and upper body of the same photo shows that I have plenty of detail, even though some of the effects of the fog are still visible.<\/p>\n

I’ll never forget this lovely and trusting owl. To this day I’ve never been closer to a wild adult Short-eared Owl and even eleven years later the feeling of intimacy with such a beautiful, wild and trusting creature remains seared in my mind.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Note: Normally I would never, ever attempt to approach a wild raptor this close. But she was so close to the dirt road I was traveling on I had no practical choice.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting quality photos of a bird in thick fog is tricky but under the right conditions it can be done.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,16,1493,360,356],"tags":[35,137,148,1752,220,263,279,6033],"class_list":["post-104439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-photography-ethics","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-female","tag-fog","tag-lower-red-rock-lake","tag-montana-2","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-the-effects-of-fog-in-bird-photography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/short-eared-owl-5559-big-crop-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-rav","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104439"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104516,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104439\/revisions\/104516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}