Tension

The storm blew itself out overnight - well, almost - and this morning it was bright and sunny down in the Vale, and something approaching warm. Up at the owl field it was also sunny - problematically so, if I'm honest - but it was still very windy. Only a couple of owls risked trying to hunt in these conditions, and they struggled to catch anything, or even sometimes to make any headway against the wind, so they never stayed up for long, and spent most of the afternoon sitting rather disconsolately in the grass. Really, the best thing I can say about my afternoon is that I didn't come home with much processing to do.

Of the few photos I took, I've come up with a couple of favourites. In the main image I caught the owl just as it began a banking turn away from me, and I like the tension in its posture, in the way its wings divide the frame on a diagonal, and between the bird and the grasses it's threading amongst. (The tension between the extremes of light and shade, maybe not so much.) My second image is a more conventional side-on fly-past, and the owl was a lot further away so is much smaller in the frame, but I like the combination of rim- and back-lighting, which work really well in lifting the bird away from the dark background.