1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nThis Short-eared Owl was perched in a large patch of completely dead sagebrush yesterday morning. It wasn’t very close to me but I trained my lens on it in hopes it would take off to fill more of my frame with its wings. It never did so I took a few shots and then left the area figuring I’d delete the\u00a0photos when I got home. I never “chimp” in the field and this was an example of one of the many reasons I don’t do it\u00a0(chimping is deleting photos “in camera”).<\/p>\n
Once I arrived home and worked up the image on the big screen I was very surprised by how much I liked it even though it’s “different”. The overall monotone appeals to me, the setting is natural though not classically beautiful, I like the looped perch and the background bokeh, the bird is well isolated from the sagebrush\u00a0and both of\u00a0the owl’s “short ears” are erected which this species doesn’t often do.<\/p>\n
And to\u00a0top it all off those beautiful yellow eyes really pop against\u00a0the sea of relatively colorless dead\u00a0sagebrush, even with the owl this small in the frame.<\/p>\n
All that with no artificial manipulation of the photo. All I did during processing was crop, resize, sharpen, make a minor exposure adjustment and add my copyright watermark – there were no color or tonal adjustments made.<\/p>\n
I realize that the image is unlikely to have universal appeal and that’s fine. But it works for me.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is far from a typical image from me and to be honest I almost deleted it before I looked at it more carefully.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60122,"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":[6,334,356],"tags":[35,4053,1845,4052,1092,644,279,4051,311],"class_list":["post-60119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-chimping","tag-monotone","tag-photo-art","tag-processing","tag-sagebrush","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-small-in-the-frame","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/short-eared-owl-9567b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-fDF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60119","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=60119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/short-eared-owl-9567b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"short-eared-owl-9567b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n