In order to show a bird in its environment in which all of the elements in the composition are sharp, it's usually necessary to put two shots together in Photoshop. My snowy owl workshop this year was conducted near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada, and the landscape potential was, to be honest, pretty bleak. Trees were few and far between -- there's snow as far as the eye can see -- but I managed to find a few stands of trees covered in hoarfrost. I then combined an unusual wing position of a female snowy with the landscape. The composite doesn't quite look real because we are so used to seeing out of focus backgrounds with telephoto lenses and, specifically, with pictures of birds. The truth is, it's blurred backgrounds that don't look real because we never see shallow depth of field with our eyes. This picture represents what we see, not what the man-made construct of our lenses shows us. The settings for the owl were 1/3200, f/10, and 1600 ISO.
0 Comments