Male Great Horned Owl
The owls are back in the oak tree near where I live. The female has been sitting on her eggs for about a month now. Still no sign of any chicks—could be any day. I was observing the hollow in the oak tree today that serves as the owl nest. Time was about 5:30 p.m.
Live oak tree hollow used by the Great Horned owls for their nest.
As is usual this time of day, the female leaves her nest for about a half hour or more to feed herself. After the chicks are born, she often brings food back when she returns to the nest. I think one of the reasons she leaves is to allow a cooling-off period for the eggs, a natural and beneficial part of the incubation process. Research has shown that mimicking this cooling off period during artificial incubation improves the hatch rates.
While the female is absent, the male is always close by keeping a watch on things. Today was no exception. Here the male is in an adjacent oak tree about 150 feet away from the nest tree. He let me get fairly close to him as I took this photo—I was about 100 feet away hiding behind another tree trunk that supported the camera and long lens. The camera is a Nikon D90 with 55-300mm telezoom. Flash fill was incorporated to remove the shadows present because of the late hour—about 20 minutes prior to sunset. Taken at 1/200 sec. and f/6.2, ISO 800. I took several shots and he never took his eyes off of me.
The male is quite distinct from the female--taller and grayer, the female larger, plumper and browner.
Stay tuned because things should develop rapidly now. I'll put up some photos of the chicks as soon as they emerge.
And Then There Were Two
Mom babysitting her two "branchers"
I think I can safely say there are only two surviving hatchlings. I'm not sure what happened to #3, but I suspect it had some kind of problem and perished. No sign of a carcass anywhere, though. So this was the scenario today when I arrived at the oak tree: mom up high and above the two "branchers" (as they are officially called now that they have ventured out of the nest).
The owls were just too far apart to get them all in focus in this shot. I went to as high an f-stop as I could with the slowest shutter speed, but the 400mm focal length just did not allow for a great enough depth of field. But I put it up just to give an idea of the general layout of the owl family in the oak tree. Here are the two babies up close:
I'll call these guys O-1 and O-2
And another one:
O-1 on the left is definitely larger, probably a few days older than O-2.
And a couple more of mom:
Mom appears none too pleased to see me.
I was using the "Better Beamer" flash attachment today and it really fills the shadows nicely. The sun was pretty high in the sky and there were a lot of shadows. The Better Beamer really lights up the owl's retinas and that's why the pupils appear reddish in places. In a couple of cases it was so intense that I had to Photoshop the "red-eye" completely out.
Owl Update
Here's today's submission. The babies are getting bigger. Don't know where #3 was today, perhaps napping. Still haven't gotten all three hatchlings together yet.
3 Hatchlings This Year
The owl family showed up right on time again this year. I've been watching them for a month or so. The eggs hatched around the 10th of January and mom has begun the brooding process wherein she gets off the nest for extended periods allowing the chicks to acclimate to their surroundings. The weather has been getting warmer with temps in the high 70's in the afternoons. I was glad to see the owls give birth to 3 apparently healthy chicks this year after losing the two chicks they had last year. Something happened last year, not sure what, but one of the chicks was definitely born with a defect. Hoping for a better result this year.
First, here's dad, off by himself in a nearby oak tree.
Mom, with her 3 babies.
The chicks are only a couple of weeks old and are still kind of shy about showing themselves to the camera, but I expect they will be climbing out on a nearby limb soon and there will be more opportunities for photos of their development.
From HDR into Night
So this was a couple of nights ago. The plan was to get out on the compass rose before sunset to set everything up for this shoot. I planned on starting with a few HDR (high dynamic range) shots while the sun was still pretty high, and then switch to off-camera lighting to catch the post sunset and twilight. Here is one of the HDR shots:
HDR test shot no. 4
Here is another HDR shot to illustrate how carried away you can get with this stuff. I call this my "grunge" look, HDR to the extreme, makes it look more like an illustration than a photo. Not sure I like this but I see a lot of it around. Pretty obvious it's HDR, so I prefer the more subtle look.
HDR to the max.
Same as before, I had two strobes out front of the airplane gelled with orange. These are to provide rim lighting in front and under the airplane. Here is the shot taken right after sunset:
Off-camera lighting no. 1
Here is the set-up shot revealing the two strobes forward of the main gear and the diffuser umbrella next to the camera tripod:
This last shot (below) was taken as the last of the ambient light was fading out and as the new moon came into the frame. I went to flip on the navigation lights for effect, and they didn't come on. Later, I found a broken connector behind the switch. Oh well.
Off-camera lighting no. 2.