I am pleased to announce that curator Donna Garcia selected the above photograph, “Owl in my Star Pine” for inclusion in the South x Southeast Gallery’s upcoming “Small Works” Exhibition. The work will be displayed online and in the South x Southeast’ gallery space in Molena, Georgia this August through September. I am also excited that exhibition will hang during “Slow Exposures” Photography Festival: Celebrating Photography in the Rural South, in neighboring Concord, Georgia.
This exhibition call was a chance for me to showcase one of my lesser-known images, in this case a photograph I have never exhibited before. I really like this photograph, but I knew when I made the exposure that the image would not fit in to any of my primary portfolios. Didn’t matter, this is an example why you should make the exposure when you see an image that interests you even if you don’t know how you would ever use it. Like that old paraphrased Winogrand quote says: “You photograph something to see what it looks like photographed”. I also liked the technical challenge of photographing an owl at night that far away.
Background about this Image. If you are familiar with Newport Beach you might not expect to find a home here with two pine trees and a 100’ tall Star Pine on the property, but my house does. I have lived here for 29 years and a couple of years ago I started hearing owls in the neighborhood, eventually they started sitting on the top of my Star Pine. The owls come and go, sometimes I hear them every night for two or three months straight and then they will be gone for several months. I have heard them on a couple times in the last week and not in my tree. I have used a 400mm lens with a flash on my D850 to photograph the owl before and was lucky to have been able to photograph two owls in the tree at the same time. With most of my owl photographs I am standing within 6 feet of my front door. For this submitted image I used my D500 with a 300mm zoom lens because I was in a hurry to get the image of the owl with the alignment of the rising moon. This image lent itself to be cropped square so for this exhibition I had it printed and framed so it was 12” x 12” with no matting (Price $375, no edition set but limited up to 27).
More photographs of the Owls
Owl in the Rain - NB DSC 1053 12-30-22
And a few photographs from last September when the crows were going after a Cooper’s Hawk in the pine tree 20’ away from my Star Pine. I didn’t see the owl at first, he looked like he was just hanging out, but I assume that he and the hawk were both going after the young in a nearby crow’s nest.
I am not a nature photographer, but I appreciate God’s creations and find all the birds in my yard interesting (although I hate the crows, they are annoying), so as a photographer, I photograph them, it is just a compulsion I guess at this point.
