"For my brother Al who is dearly missed"
During the Spring of 2015 I had arranged a visit to the Arctic Circle "Finland" to photograph Great Grey Owls, but since that time the only record I had of the visit was the wonderful memory I had.
When I got home I did not process any photos at the majority looked dark and under-exposed, I was there for 4 days and every day was overcast so all of my images looked rather flat and a lot were pushing ridiculously high ISO levels causing lots of noise and colour grain but I was not disappointed as it was a wonderful trip and just seeing these Owls was worth it for me.
These images had been gathering dust on one of my old hard drives so I decided to give them a go again in Photoshop due to some recent success processing some images that were under exposed and dark, so after all this time I thought these images were a lost hope and would never see the light of day but they actually turned out alright.
This first shot was taken in near darkness with a shutter speed of just 1/13th of a second and with a focal length of 500mm, I've cleaned it up by removing a lot of the noise from the background.
This next set was an unexpected surprise and I was caught off guard, I had my camera settings set from a previous shoot still dialed in whilst this wonderful Owl made its way down the mountain towards me, I quickly shot of a burst and hoped for the best, it was also snowing quite heavily which didn't help with initially finding it in the the viewfinder.
This next set show an Owl perched on what is either a low voltage power line or Telegraph cable (I've looked online but i'm still unsure)
These next shots were taken on the edge of a forest, the snow was really deep and it was a struggle to get close without disturbing this Owl, luckily the Owl stayed put perched in this tree despite my clumsy movement as I set up my tripod and was able to get the following shots.
