Hold Verrrrry Still

The Barn Owls in one of our boxes have just about fledged (we think this is the last of the clutch) and they gather relatively early in the evening on the box to wait for the parents to bring them breakfast. In the morning, they hang around waiting for one last meal then either go inside the box or into the surrounding trees to spend the day. This one seemed a bit uncertain about the concept and was still perched on the box holding very still until a bit after 6:30 this morning (over an hour past dawn). This actually seemed to work as the songbirds ignored it and a harrier and crows came through the property without apparently paying any attention to it.

Since it seemed determined to stay put, I decided it was worth trying for some low light pictures (cloudy, rainy, misty weather) and went up into my "treehouse" for this one. If the weather cooperates, I'll go back up this evening in hopes of getting some of the antics of the group.

1Div, 500mm f4 ISL + 1.4TC, Black Widow on RRS legs, f5.6, 1/60, Av mode with +1/3 stop compensation (unintentional-I set if for shooting up at it with cloudy sky bg), iso 1600. Live view mode and cable release. Processed in CS6. A few degrees of image rotation and a slight crop resulted in a final size of 12.7MP. Noise reduction using Neat Image. Taken this morning at 5:47 am.

Your comments and criticisms are always appreciated.

Thanks for looking,