My two snowy owl workshops are over now until I repeat them next year, so this is the last photo I'll post of these beautiful birds until then. The owl passed incredibly close to the camera position here, and I used just 100mm of focal length to capture this. I was very surprised it was sharp because the bird was flying so fast, and between the autofocus point selection and the speed of the focus tracking, it's never possible to know you've got the shot until you examine the image on the computer. Because the owl was so close, and because I used a telephoto lens, it was impossible for the background to be in focus. More and more, I am finding that complete depth of field, especially in situations where we rarely see it, is quite compelling. So, I combined a background landscape from this same area of southern Ontario, Canada to make an image that looks like the scene I could see with my eyes but that is optically impossible due to the limitations of lenses. My settings were 1/3200, f/11, 6400. Initially, you might think this looks unrealistic, but that's only because we are not used to seeing this kind of focus depth with bird photography.
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