{"id":41264,"date":"2016-08-05T05:09:06","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T11:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=41264"},"modified":"2016-08-05T09:13:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-05T15:13:54","slug":"northern-pygmy-owl-with-a-vole-for-breakfast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/05\/northern-pygmy-owl-with-a-vole-for-breakfast\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Pygmy Owl With A Vole For Breakfast"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was my first experience photographing a wild Northern Pygmy Owl.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern1\/320, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc,\u00a0not baited, set up, flashed or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I found the bird a few weeks ago near the border of southwest Montana and Idaho as it flew across the dirt road in front of me with prey and then landed in just about the worst lighting conditions possible. After this shot it moved to another nearby perch\u00a0and began to devour the vole (or pocket gopher?)\u00a0but the lighting conditions there weren’t much better.<\/p>\n

To be perfectly honest if this image were of almost any other species I’d have tossed it.\u00a0I cut off the tail of the vole, the angle is steep and the owl was in deep shade with bright sky behind it. I had to make significant exposure adjustments to the entire image during processing\u00a0to make it look as good as it does (something I really don’t like to do).<\/p>\n

But I kept the image because it was\u00a0my first experience with a Northern Pygmy Owl, it had prey, the prey was a\u00a0rodent instead of the more common small bird or insect and I appreciate the\u00a0realism of the caked blood on the beak.<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0end I just didn’t have the heart to delete it.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Addendum: Ok, I’m getting a lot of heat for admitting that I thought about deleting this image. \ud83d\ude42<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/p>\n

This is the unprocessed version of the same image. Perhaps at least some will now understand why I (briefly) considered trashing it…<\/em><\/p>\n

During processing of the RAW file\u00a0I increased exposure on the overall file, then increased exposure in the shadows and darks some more\u00a0and decreased exposure in the highlights. No\u00a0adjustments in saturation or contrast were made. That processing was all done in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) before I resized, sharpened and added my copyright logo in Photoshop.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was my first experience photographing a wild Northern Pygmy Owl.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41266,"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":[334,392,1493,3025],"tags":[779,3026,220,3024,256,315],"class_list":["post-41264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-northern-pygmy-owls","tag-beaverhead-county","tag-glaucidium-gnoma","tag-montana-2","tag-northern-pygmy-owl","tag-prey","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/northern-pygmy-owl-7484b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-aJy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41264","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=41264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}