I took this picture of an albino barred owl many years ago when I was still shooting medium format (6x7cm) film. The owl was privately owned and cared for because it could never survive in the wild. White owls have no camouflage, and their prey would see them coming from long distances. I purposely cropped out the feet because there were jesses on each ankle -- leather straps used in falconry to prevent the bird's escape. This was prior to Photoshop, and at the time there would have been no way to eliminate the leather. The eyes of the bird were actually brown, but I used flash and I positioned the flash just above the lens -- i.e. virtually along the lens axis. This created 'red eye' -- just like in people where the flash reflects off the retina in the eye. I thought the red eyes would be ultra dramatic, and that's what I was going for with such a unique owl. This is a straight image with no subsequent digital manipulation. My settings were unrecorded, but knowing how I used to shoot, I would guess this was taken with Fujichrome 100 (100 ISO), a Mamiya RZ 67 II camera, probably f/11, 1/60, and a 350mm lens which is equivalent to about an 180mm lens when a full frame digital camera is used. The flash was a Metz 60 CT-1. Everything in the camera was manual -- the focus, the exposure, and even the film advance.
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