Owl Watch, Patience…

Getting these photos and videos is interesting… for the most part I’m just waiting for something ‘interesting’ to happen. I can stand there for an hour or two and only get 7 minutes of interesting material. It’s a waiting game for sure. And it seems to never fail that right around the time I’m getting bored and thinking of packing up my gear, that there is suddenly movement in the cave. Perhaps the owlets will do something interesting… for me, anything that isn’t sleeping (or eating) is shutter button worthy.

Each day, I have an alarm telling me that it’s 3 hours until sundown… that’s when the light is pretty good into the cave, but sometimes there is still a bit of a hard shadow, for the most part I’m getting something interesting without having to rely too much on post-processing to reveal the shadows. But each day, I wonder, ‘will it be worth it to go today?’… then I tell myself that today would be the day they learn to fly, just because I wasn’t there to witness it. So if it isn’t raining, I go, and I wait.

Yesterday, was definitely a waiting game… at first there was some movement, and OK light, but lots of shadow…

Then almost on cue, the owlets hid in the shadow…

I don’t know if you can see them (I couldn’t until I came back and futzed with the image in post), but the owlets are in the shadow. I knew they had to be in there, because I just saw them go back there and they seem too big to fit under Mama Owl now, but honestly, I was just pointing at the cave and hoping I was getting something…

Nearly a half hour later I could finally see the owlets in the back of the cave, the harsh shadow had decreased and the cave was revealed…

During that half hour while I waited for something interesting to happen, I played around with some more ‘behind-the-scenes’ ideas. One being this video of just how far away the cave is from my camera…