How to choose appropriate camera settings for the conditions<\/span>. One of the challenges with this owl was low light because it was nearly always overcast while I was photographing him and I usually had dark shaded mountains in the background. Fast moving birds in flight require sufficient shutter speed to get them sharp and that’s hard to get in low light. One way to get more SS is to adjust my aperture but with my gear (including my cropped frame camera and attached teleconverter) I’m limited to f\/5.6 or above so my other option is to increase my ISO. But increasing ISO introduces more noise (grain) into the image so I had to decide where the best balance was to give me as much SS as possible with a noise level I was willing to accept. After enough time with this owl I decided I wouldn’t go above ISO 800 (my older 7D doesn’t handle noise as well as my Mark II) and I’d take my chances with shutter speed and motion blur.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n
In addition to improving my skill set he also taught me a lot about Short-eared Owl natural history and behavior.<\/p>\n
So thanks ol’ buddy. Your kind can live for up to 13 years in the wild so I hope you’re still out there somewhere, terrorizing rodents and lovin’ life!<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Largely because of all I learned from him this may be my favorite individual bird I’ve ever photographed.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75611,"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":[6,334,360,356],"tags":[35,4721,146,203,220,256,263,1857,279,4720,315],"class_list":["post-75610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-camera-settings-for-the-conditions","tag-flight","tag-life-span","tag-montana-2","tag-prey","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-rodent","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-tracking-birds-in-flight","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/short-eared-owl-7129-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jFw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75610","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=75610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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