![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/burrowing-owl-0178-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"burrowing-owl-0178-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nBy summer of 2009 I’d only been seriously photographing birds for about a year and I was still a novice to technique. Someone had told me that f\/8 was the “sweet spot” for my particular lens and I’d learned to keep my ISO’s relatively low to avoid digital noise which meant that I often had shutter speeds below 1\/1000 sec and with stationery birds\u00a0those settings\u00a0usually served me well.<\/p>\n
Being the extreme creature of\u00a0habit that I am\u00a0they became my default settings in the field.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
1\/800, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n But on\u00a0July 7 of that summer this newly fledged Burrowing Owl along the Antelope Island causeway finally made me realize that I should rethink my strategy. This bird and a few others nearby were some of my first opportunities with owls\u00a0of any species and my excitement with them was palpable. Over about a week I was able to get many thousands of nice photos\u00a0of them while they were stationary or moving slowly and I thought my “go to” settings were about perfect for the situation. I was in bird photographer heaven!<\/p>\n But this particular image strongly suggested differently. The right foot of the clumsy young bird slipped on the\u00a0perch\u00a0which caused the owl to use its wings to gain balance again and when I looked at this\u00a0photo on my\u00a0screen at home I was hugely disappointed by the extreme softness of the right wing. It was at that point that my ignorant self finally figured out that 1\/800 sec SS just wasn’t fast enough to freeze moving wings and\u00a0motion blur was the result (the photo was taken just after dawn when the light was low which really\u00a0affected my SS.) Some folks don’t mind a little\u00a0wing motion blur as long as the rest\u00a0of the bird is sharp (and sometimes I don’t either) because it suggests the natural motion of the wings but this was way too much softness for me.<\/p>\n So from this day forward I started experimenting with faster\u00a0shutter speeds (and the\u00a0other settings necessary to achieve them)\u00a0even with stationery birds because you just never know when your subject will do something interesting (included taking off) and birds are fast! The price to be paid (a slight increase in digital noise and\/or reduced depth of field)\u00a0is usually very small and I’ll gladly pay it when the alternative is\u00a0soft images that otherwise might be very interesting or even spectacular. As I often say, I’d much rather have too much SS than too little.<\/p>\n So last night when I stumbled across this ancient image it reminded me of how much I owe to this owl. Today I have many thousands of nice action images in my portfolio that without the lesson first\u00a0learned from this\u00a0bird I’d have deleted because of excessive motion blur.<\/p>\n It could be argued that I owe this cute little guy a huge debt of\u00a0gratitude.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It could be argued that I owe this cute little fledgling Burrowing Owl a huge debt of gratitude.<\/p>\n