Photographing Barn Owls with David Tipling

Photographing Barn Owls with David Tipling 

When I retired, (some six years ago now) I had four things on a `hit list` that I particularly wanted to photograph. They were Adders, Red Squirrels, Kingfishers and Barn Owls in flight. I managed to photograph the first three within the first couple of years of my retirement, but getting good shots of `wild` Barn Owls in flight always proved very difficult. For some reason I just could not seem to `connect` with Barn Owls. I went to locations where I knew they had been seen, and although I had managed to get a few shots, I never took any images that I was happy with. 

Last week I spent a day in Norfolk with professional wildlife photographer David Tipling. North Norfolk is one of the best places in the country for Barn Owls, and because David lives there, he knows the area like the back of his hand. I would certainly recommend  David to anyone wanting to photograph Barn Owls. You can contact David on his web site at
https://davidtipling.com/

He took me to a four different locations, and we saw Barn Owls at each of these locations. One site was so good, that we actually had three Barn Owls quartering the meadow at the same time !  

Like David, I use Olympus equipment. I was using my EM1X , 300mm F4 Pro lens with the MC14 converter attached. This gave me a focal length of equivalent to 840mm on a full frame DSLR. The big advantage was that with the Olympus set up, it is quite easy to hand hold, - a great bonus when you are trying to track and lock on to birds in flight. On the equivalent of my old Canon system, I would have had to have this set up on a heavy tripod with a gimbal head, so it would have been impossible to hand hold.

 I set the ISO speed depending on how the lighting changed. I always prefer to set the ISO myself rather than putting the camera on Auto ISO. I know some photographers swear by Auto ISO, but I feel more in control if I set the ISO speed myself  rather than letting the camera set it at what it `thinks` it should be. I varied it between ISO 400 to ISO 1000. Autofocus and drive was set to Sequential High and the 9 square metering pattern was used for auto focus.  

We were standing in front of a hedge so that our silhouettes were not against the skyline. This bird flew over the top of the hedge almost touching our heads and then landed on a fence post 30 yards in front of us. It stayed there for about 20 seconds watching  before it decided to fly away !