Hypnotized
Oct, 2015Views
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Staff Winter Selection 2015
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Peer Award
Absolute Masterpiece
Superb Composition
Outstanding Creativity
Magnificent Capture
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Behind The Lens
Location
This picture was taken during a festival called “Elf Fantasy Fair” in the Netherlands in 2010. Nowadays this festival is called “Elfia”. According to their own website Elfia is “a festival that is focused on the expression of dreams. Costumes are the most obvious way to shape these dreams. Often they are inspired on the clothes of characters from tv series, movies and comics. But we also go further than only costumes: music, photography, body art, body painting, vehicles... They are all opportunities to make those dreams reality”. One of the visitors of this event was a man who owned several birds of prey. A few of these birds posed in front of my camera. The owl on the picture is one of them.Time
Although this picture is more than 6 years old the EXIF data helped me find the exact date and time. The picture was taken on april 24th 2010 at 15:03 PM. The weather conditions were good that day, actually the sun was very bright and created (too) harsh shadows.Lighting
Fortunately the owl was on the inside of a big open white tent that (luckily for me) acted as a diffusor for the bright sunlight. On the downside my shutterspeed was pretty long compared to outside conditions. Because I wanted as little noise as possible I wanted to take the picture at 100 ISO and still be able to get it right without use of a tripod (I didn’t carry one that day). Fortunately I managed to get a sharp image at a shutterspeed of 1/60th of a second. The aparture was big enough (f/4) to make the tent go out of focus.Equipment
6 Years ago I didn’t have the equipment that I have nowadays. Back then I was carrying a Panasonc Lumix DMC-FZ28 which was - for that price - a very decent camera. Although more expensive cameras can give you more creative freedom and better quality images, this proves that you don’t always need to spend lots of money to make an appealing picture.Inspiration
The Elfia event attracts a lot of photographers every year because of the beautiful outfits that people are wearing and the beautiful surroundings (a big castle with huge gardens). Although personaly I prefer to take pictures of animals instead of people I didn’t expect to see many animals that day. As you probably can imagine as soon as I say this beautiful bird I immediately grabbed my camera.Editing
I didn’t do much post-processing. I only cropped it a little to make sure the owls head was exactly divided in 2 (don’t worry, just on the picture!). Furthermore, I enhanced the saturation just by a few percent. I didn’t (need to) make any color corrections or do any retouching. I even didn’t retouch the birds eye, which may have looked better probably. Now you can still see the reflections of the surroundings.In my camera bag
Nowadays when I go out to take pictures I generally carry a bag with my Canon EOS 5D MIII, a Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM, a Canon ef 17-40mm f/4.0 lS USM, a Carl Zeiss Planar 1.4/85mm, a Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT, a few filters and several other things that make my back hurt after a full day of taking pics. ;-)Feedback
Be patient, especially with animals. Respect (wild)life and never forget an animals life is more important than a thousand pictures!
