In order to shoot the bearded owls, we organized trips for several days. Owls often hunt pritas, relying solely on their unique hearing. It is easy to confuse a sitting owl with a stump and it is difficult to make out against the background of trees.
Looking for our models, we slowly walked through the forest belts between the fields and carefully examined all the trees. Naturally, the first thing started from the places where these birds were previously met.
Finding a predator, we followed him.
In those places, owls got used to the presence of people and were very loyal to such a neighborhood. The picture above illustrates well, owls quietly fly past people, they, in general, are not at all interested in and do not bother them.
No one can quietly walk on dry grass and this rustle prevented the bird from hunting. We are so fed up with her that she began to fly away from us. Oh, and then rushed through the fields, but I still managed to get to the hunter so close that the bird ceased to intervene in the frame. I had a lens with a fixed zoom focal length. I wanted to take the whole owl off, but it would be fraught with a provocation of another change of place to reduce the distance. Randomly removing two vertical frames in a row with a slight offset, I suddenly remembered that you can shoot a panorama.
Tawny distracted me from my friend, who tried unsuccessfully to walk without causing a loud crunch of branches under her feet. At that moment I turned the camera horizontally and shot a panorama of six-frame owls. As a result, a larger resolution image was obtained, where the texture of the feathers is clearly visible, and the background is blurred quite well. All that is needed in such situations is perseverance and ingenuity.
Upon returning to the camp, it turned out that the second team was also running after an owl, and indeed, there were 4 birds per day.
Remember, if you do not have enough focal length, you can always shoot a panorama :)