Owl Evening

The owl photography evening booked out overnight, and with one late cancellation one lucky person filled the spot at the last minute. Thanks to all who came and made the evening so enjoyable for myself and Izzy... we hope you all had a great time too and went home with some super photos!

Contrary to what many think, I rarely have time with the camera around work, so I took the opportunity to take my camera with me and take a few pics too.

We started off the evening in the woods, getting out of the hot sun for a while and using the dappled light to make the most of the habitat using Archimedes above.

After that we were ready for the sun again, heading back out to the main reserve you can see the gang above... what are they photographing? Well the amazing wall of course, still standing, and this time with a little owl in it!

Scrappy was getting a little too hot, so we decided to move him to a shady area to cool, the badger hide provided the perfect spot.

Around half 6 the light was just becoming perfectly soft, Kevin was next on the agenda using the last of the light in the main reserve.

For the last couple of hours we were chasing the light to make the most of the golden glow. We moved to the new area of the reserve that we are developing and tried Fawkes in some white flowers.

I am sure you will see some amazing photos of Florence flying over the water, complete with reflection, on flickr soon... I had to help Iz fly, but was content with this portrait of her gazing at the midges. While perched she even managed to pounce and catch a vole ;-) None of us were quick enough to get this though.

A lot of you that follow my sister blog will know that I love using the light in my own photography, and at times can become a little obsessed with back light... I thought I would experiment with our long-eared owl Archimedes while the evening was so nice.

The light was fading fast, very fast, but we caught the last of it in the grass with Fawkes... difficult to see on this small photo, but you might be able to work out the setting sun reflected in his eye!

With the light gone, but always looking for new opportunities, we took the advantage of a beautiful sunset to get some silhouettes. We only had 5 minutes before it went, so used our short-eared owl while he was still out. But imagine the above with a  long-eared... Wow!

I think everyone went away happy. Keep an eye on the blog, I will announce a mammal evening soon and possibly another owl evening later in the Summer.