![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/short-eared-owl-7404-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"short-eared-owl-7404-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nA pleasant surprise hidden deep in my photo files.<\/p>\n
Yesterday while searching for something else in an older computer I accidentally clicked on an area in my photo organizer I hadn’t visited in ages and up popped a photo I didn’t even know (or remember) existed. I probably overlooked it because the bird is fairly small in the unprocessed frame and at the time it was taken I knew the conditions for photographing birds in flight were horrible so the bird was almost certainly soft.<\/p>\n
He wasn’t.<\/p>\n
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1\/640, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n It’s an older photo of a male Short-eared Owl delivering a large vole to his family at the nest at Montana’s Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. This particular bird was usually easy to recognize because of a missing primary on his left wing and another damaged primary on the same wing.<\/p>\n It was mostly overcast that morning so much of the time the owl was in poor light and I had far too little shutter speed for flight shots. But for a brief few moments when this photo was taken the sun peeked out through a hole in the clouds and lit up the owl with the deeply shaded Centennial Mountains in the background. I love the resulting spotlight effect.<\/p>\n So yesterday I was surprised, even amazed, when I opened the image perhaps for the first time and the owl was sharp. Flight shots at a shutter speed of only 1\/640 are almost a guaranteed recipe for soft photos but when I looked at the owl at 100% he was sharp and that had to be mostly dumb luck. I must have been panning my lens at exactly the same speed and direction he was flying and caught him at a moment when he wasn’t flapping his left wing.<\/p>\n The high contrast between the owl and the dark background probably helped my active focus point to lock on but even so it was a near-miracle.to not have any motion blur, except for a little in his right wing that we don’t see much of anyway..<\/p>\n