Eye Opener

It was 5 minutes after sunrise at my local nature reserve when I was lucky enough to have a totally unexpected encounter with this young Long Eared Owl dozing on a perch. To my surprise it just sat there and opened one eye to reveal a fully dilated pupil set in a beautiful orange coloured iris. Luckily, I was able to capture a couple of images before it flew off silently through the trees. As the available light was so low I could only achieve a slow shutter speed of 1/50 sec even with the aperture wide open at f5.6 and the maximum ISO of 12800. Luckily, the Owl was motionless and my camera was on a tripod which enabled me to capture a sharp image. I did need to apply some noise reduction to ensure high image quality.