Tonight I was present for the release of two Great Horned Owls.  This is the smaller one.  Yes, it was close to dark in the back roads of woods in land owned by a local University. This is good owl country.

How to take the shot?  You have little clue how the raptor will react or which way it will fly.  And focus..well, I got far off enough to set a manual focus with fairly wide coverage.  This had to be a flash shot and I intended if using flash to be behind the bird. Had it come at me, there would have been no photo at all.  Perhaps it was a mistake and contributed to the fuzzy image but I used rear shutter flash, hope of enough ambient light to get a sharp owl with a flight trail. Well, the owl was too fast for me or the flash.

The larger one offered no photo at all.   

What made this nice was not getting a poor photo of an owl being released into the wild...the release itself was magnificient ...to see each owl in its place and turn fly strongly further into the woods and away from us.  The flight is totally silent, adding even more to the sense of what happened.  We were silent and when an owl left all was silent.

I have a shot of the owls prior to release taken in their holding area a few days ago and will post it if all works out.  You see, this pc went down and it took a system restore to get going again tonight. So, first business was to move unbacked stuff to the external discs.

Color in my monitor is screwy now..if the photo color is totally off to you, I can't see that here. Color levels change ever so often.  I am now in for a new monitor cetainly this time and some pc work.  Enjoy the fuzzy owl shot.                 TomDart.