![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/great-horned-owl-0134-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"great-horned-owl-0134-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nThis female Great Horned Owl\u00a0cost me a pile of money.<\/p>\n
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1\/200, f\/9, ISO 400, Canon Rebel XTi, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS\u00a0USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n I believe this was the female of the mated pair living on our Montana farm and it’s one of the oldest bird photographs I’ve kept from the very early days of my bird photography adventure. It was taken on May 16, 2007 with my very first DSLR camera and relatively high quality bird lens. As usual for my GHO photos this one is perched in an auger cutout in one of the many old granaries on the family\u00a0farm.<\/p>\n I’d driven the 700 miles to the farm specifically\u00a0to photograph the owls and other raptors that were so abundant\u00a0up there\u00a0and I did it soon after buying that lens, the Canon 100-400mm. After several earlier\u00a0attempts at photographing the owls with a much cheaper and lower quality lens (a 70-300mm I believe) in my naivet\u00e9\u00a0I was convinced that with my new lens\u00a0I’d now have enough reach and enough image quality to\u00a0almost routinely\u00a0get high quality raptor\u00a0images.<\/p>\n I was wrong.<\/p>\n Though my image quality was much improved I still didn’t have nearly enough reach in most situations. Neither the owls nor the various species of buteos (mostly Red-tailed, Swainson’s and Ferruginous Hawks) would let me get close enough. And when I cropped those images drastically to try to make up for it\u00a0my image quality suffered badly. After almost a week on the farm and many, many hours attempting to photograph birds, especially raptors, this GHO this one time let me get close enough for quality images that didn’t have to be cropped much.<\/p>\n This bird showed me what\u00a0was possible if I could get close enough, physically or optically, with high quality glass.<\/p>\n Since I had very little control over how close I could get physically I stewed about the remote possibility of buying my dream lens to get closer optically for the entire 11 hour drive back to Utah. That lens was the Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM which I could use with a teleconverter and be shooting at 1120 mm with my cropped sensor camera and still get superb image quality. But I was a recently retired teacher on a budget and even back then that lens cost over $5000 (it’s almost twice that much\u00a0now for the newer version)\u00a0so by the end\u00a0of my drive home I’d decided that my bird photography days were over. If I couldn’t do it well I wouldn’t do it at all.\u00a0By the time I pulled into my driveway I’d made up my mind to sell my\u00a0photo gear and go back into my other hobby with a vengeance – furniture building.<\/p>\n And then just a few weeks later came the miracle, an unexpected gift from the estate of my cousin and best friend\u00a0Ken Dudley.\u00a0So I was able to buy my dream lens and the rest is history (regular blog followers already know that entire story).<\/p>\n But if this particular owl hadn’t\u00a0cooperated that single time so I could see what was really possible I almost surely\u00a0wouldn’t have spent the money. So this was an expensive bird for me but to this day I’m still\u00a0grateful to her\u00a0for her few seconds of cooperation.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n Notes: <\/em><\/p>\n Part of the reason I’m posting more older photos than usual\u00a0lately is because birds have been slow for quite a while now. But thankfully they’re\u00a0finally\u00a0starting to pick up significantly. In the last few days I’ve been seeing good numbers of Ferruginous Hawks, including a group of five of them together and at least one was a juvenile (when I first published this post I called them Rough-legged Hawks instead of Ferruginous. I do know the difference, I just had a brain fart).<\/em><\/p>\n And yesterday morning\u00a0a\u00a0Northern Goshawk flushed right in front of my pickup before I knew\u00a0it was there.\u00a0It crossed the road low\u00a0and close to me and\u00a0then disappeared into the trees. <\/em>That rare\u00a0bird really got my juices flowing!<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This female Great Horned Owl cost me a pile of money.<\/p>\n