RonaldSill

Pin Point Landing

Owl in Sonora Desert

Owl in Sonora Desert
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Canon EOS 5D Mark III

settings

Aperture f/3.2 ISO 400 Shutter 1/8000 Focal Length 125/1

upload_date

Jan, 2015

Views

177

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Behind The Lens

Location

This photo was taken at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (https://www.desertmuseum.org/).

Time

This was taken in the late morning, probably around 10:30 am.

Lighting

All natural light on a bright, cloudless day in the Arizona desert.

Equipment

I used my Canon 5D Mark II Camera, 70-200 lens at 125mm, handheld.

Inspiration

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has a great bird in flight show that makes images like this much easier to get than if you were to try get a shot by just hiking around the desert.

Editing

I processed this with some basic cropping, sharpening, contrast and color enhancements.

In my camera bag

This was basically a walking around shot so gear for me in this situation in camera with one lens on it with an additional lens in a lens bag over my shoulder. I typically carry a 16-35 and a 70-200 for lenses on a walk around shoot that may include landscapes and wildlife.

Feedback

Shots like this warrant using a higher speed shutter. With the latest camera bodies able to handle higher ISO with quality one should really push the shutter speeds to be north of 1/1,000 to freeze the wingtips for birds in motion. This was shot at ISO400 and f/3.2 on a bright sunny day in the desert which got me 1/8000 second. This high speed shutter got me what I wanted for image sharpness and even though I think 1/8000 is overkill I don't think the image suffered any negative affects by being at ISO400 and the DOF is nice enough that I don't think a smaller aperture would have bought me anything better for the final image. The reason I didn't shoot at f/2.8 is so the f/3.2 would buy me a little more margin for DOF in case of a miss on the sweet spot for focus. Given it to do all over again I would probably have use maybe an f/4.0 since I still would have had decent shutter speed and a touch more DOF and margin of error.

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RonaldSill

RonaldSill

Pin Point Landing

Owl in Sonora Desert

Behind The Lens

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