{"id":18841,"date":"2013-09-29T06:06:03","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T12:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=18841"},"modified":"2013-09-29T06:06:03","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T12:06:03","slug":"three-burrowing-owls-and-more-challenges-with-depth-of-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/29\/three-burrowing-owls-and-more-challenges-with-depth-of-field\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Burrowing Owls and More Challenges With Depth Of Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s post about a Red-tailed Hawk and depth of field reminded me of a wonderful but frustrating opportunity I had with Burrowing Owls several years ago on Antelope Island so I decided to revisit those shots to see what I could salvage.\u00a0 One of the\u00a0difficulties with shooting with a long lens is dealing with the very narrow depth of field you have to work with and for obvious reasons that issue often becomes compounded when there’s several birds in the frame.<\/p>\n

I’d been photographing a family of these birds for several weeks but typical of the species they were usually on the ground with obstructing vegetation in front of them or buried too deeply in the sagebrush.\u00a0 But as I approached them on this early August\u00a0morning\u00a0(in my pickup, from the road) there were two juveniles and one adult perched high on the sagebrush in\u00a0nice warm light and there was a clean, pleasing background.\u00a0 My little heart went pit-a-pat at the opportunity but then I had to deal with the harsh reality of depth of field.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/200, f\/13, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The juvenile in front was probably about a foot closer to me than the other two birds – that’s a lot of depth to get sharp when you’re effectively shooting at 1120\u00a0mm (500mm lens x 1.4 tc x 1.6 crop factor of the Canon 7D).\u00a0\u00a0 I was all over the place with my settings and focus points trying to get all three birds as sharp as possible and of course I had to deal with the poses of the birds, too.\u00a0 In reviewing the images it seemed that\u00a0the sharpest shots had at least one of the birds looking away (naturally…).<\/p>\n

Then I decided to\u00a0creep forward a little to see if I could get all three birds isolated from each other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/200, f\/13, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It worked but I only had a few seconds with them before one of the birds flew off so I didn’t have much opportunity to play with my settings\u00a0from this vantage point.<\/p>\n

I posted a smaller version of\u00a0this image when I first started blogging (when not many folks knew I\u00a0 was\u00a0“out there” so I suspect few have seen it) and at the time I\u00a0lamented the fact that the juvenile on the left is\u00a0slightly soft compared to the other two.\u00a0 But this time I applied a bit more sharpening to the softer bird and to my eye the overall results are now within the acceptable range.<\/p>\n

Even though neither of these images are among the sharpest in my portfolio I still like them a lot – if for no other reason than as a reminder of time spent with three wonderful birds in a magical setting.<\/p>\n

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

I’d been photographing a family of these birds for several weeks but typical of the species they were usually on the ground with obstructing vegetation in front of them or buried too deeply in the sagebrush. But as I approached them on this early August morning (in my pickup, from the road) there were two juveniles and one adult perched high on the sagebrush in nice warm light and there was a clean, pleasing background. My little heart went pit-a-pat at the opportunity but then I had to deal with the harsh reality of depth of field.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18843,"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":[3,6,334,365],"tags":[31,510,62,105,1671],"class_list":["post-18841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-depth-of-field","tag-sharpening"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/burrowing-owl-2454-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4TT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18841","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=18841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}