Photo and comments by Howard Wilion
I think the photo looks great, but I don’t know photography. This seemed like a post those of you that do like photography may enjoy.
For all of us though, it’s important to remember for all the great successes we may see posted online, there were many more imperfect attempts. Keep at whatever your passions are, and always keep improving!
I like to feature some of my “misses” as well as successes so some of you can see what a photographer has to go through. Usually when this owl is this awake, he is in the very front of the hole and it’s a lot darker out. kind of like this view of him more towards the back with those big, beautiful eyes staring off into the distance. But I really hate how out of focus the front of the hole is. This photo gave me the inspiration to try to improve it by using a small enough aperture to get the front of the hole also in focus, which might be impossible. In the many times I’ve been back trying since, either the owl is in a bad position, has his sleepy face on with closed eyes, or the light where he is hanging out is much too dark to stop down enough. will keep trying as would really like to get the shot as want it. might even try focus stacking, but with a subject that likes to move, might be difficult. It’s all about dedication, and some photographers have more of it than others.
A technical note for photographers as it regards to Depth of Field charts… think I may have touched on this before. You can’t really go by the simple ones where you just put in your lens length, aperture, and distance. Many more ingredients go into what an observer will consider “acceptable sharpness” (which is open to interpretation). Those things are, sensor size, amount of cropping, size of print, viewing distance of print, and image degradation as it regards to diffraction at smaller apertures. So, throw those DOF charts away unless you find one that you can enter ALL the variables. Otherwise, you may be led astray.
So, one thing about that. most photo cameras have a sequential mode… where they keep taking pictures as long as the button is held. It makes it easy to snap ten or twenty photos in a single moment.
This is how people catching action photography tend to get those perfectly timed shots (it’s not perfect. there’s still a lot of skill and experience there.) but pro-photographers are never taking ‘just one’. Even in portriate photography, where everything except the subject is completely controlled… the subject might just glance the wrong way, or blink or whatever.
and with the modern era where they’re fitting 1tb of data storage onto a micro SD card… (or, like 256 gigs in a $40 card…)… there’s really no reason not to spam them.
As a side note, for people just getting started, another feature of sequential modes in cameras- most will have it- is called ‘bracketing’. If you’re out and about, you can set the camera to change either the aperture or the exposure time to bracket what you’re current setting is.
It’s… a double edged sword. If you know what setting you’re needing to be using, it just wastes photographs. But if you’re uncertain, or wanting to experiment with lighting and settings, it’s a great way to get ‘the same photograph’, but with different settings. it can help you get a more intuitive feel for how things affect final composition, (but it can also increase the risk of missing the perfect moment.)