Bird Retrospective 1: Boreal Owl

Over the next week or so I’m going to be sharing some of my bird photography from the past few years. These images will cover a range when I was taking photography from a passionate hobby into the realm of professionalism. I’m curious, for my own sake, to see how the images have progressed. I’ll tell the story of how the image came to be, and then a bit of honest self-critique, which I believe is valuable for self-improvement. Many of these images are years old and I’m not as emotionally involved in them as I was when I created them. (Photographers, and its certainly true for me, have a tendency to get their feelings wrapped around their images. We think of the effort it took the make the shot, the memories the photo renews and our feelings surrounding it, but none of that matters. If the image doesn’t look good, it doesn’t matter that you spent four hours on a bitterly cold day sitting in cramped blind to get that frame. If the frame sucks, it still sucks, no matter the effort.) In short, I’ll be trying to be as objective as possible.

We’ll start with this image of a Boreal Owl. I made this shot in the spring of 2007. The equipment used is a Canon 20D and a 70-200 f2.8 lens. This shot is a wildlife shot, only in the most general terms. This little owl was brought into my work place (the Alaska Bird Observatory) just after it had been clipped by a passing car. The bird was stunned, but not obviously injured. I placed the dozy puffball in a cardboard box and set it in a warm part of my office where it could recover for a few hours. After work I drove out where the owl had been hit and walked into the woods a short distance. Carefully I pulled the owl from the box, passed it off to my partner Amy, so I could take a few shots of it in her hands. When she let go, the owl took flight and landed about 20 yards away in a short, black spruce. The bird was still a bit dazed from its harrowing day and allowed me to approach within a few yards where I made this image. A moment later the bird spread its wings, and disappeared into the forest.

The image itself is one I’d rather generically call “OK”. It isn’t spectacular. There are some distracting branches, the bird’s pose with the droopy eyes and fluffed feathers, suggest to someone who is familiar with birds, that it was under stress (never a good feature of a wildlife image). It is fairly sharp; sharp enough anyway. The composition is decent, I left a fair amount of headroom, but too little on the sides, in fact clipping the wing tips with the right side of the frame, something I should have noticed at the time. The light is decent, though the bird sits in shadow with the brightest part of the frame the bright sky in the background. I’d personally prefer the sun to hit the bird. Though sunlight is not something we have control of in the field, it still effects the success of the image. Like I said it’s OK, I’ve sold the image in the form of greeting cards so its made a few dollars and still today, I’d consider it a “keeper” if not a particularly great one.

I’ll be trying to do these each day for the next week or so. Keep checking back.

(If you think this image is bit better than OK and would like to have a copy as a print or digital download, you can find it and several other images of boreal owls right here on my stock site: http://wildimaginationphotography.zenfolio.com/?q=boreal%20owl. (Get 20% any image with coupon code: WIJournal20)

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