One of the joys in visiting family in falkirk is taking the opportunity to visit the https://www.scottishowlcentre.com/
It’s the largest collection of exotic owls in the world and a worthy subject to shake down my new EOS R6iii camera!
My put my EF 100-400mm f5.6 II LIS on my R6ii and my mighty EF 400mm f2.8 II LIS on my new R6iii.
The results are impressive. It was a really sunny and wildly hot day, so the owls weren’t up for flying around much during the presentation and fly by. The weather was nice for humans, not so nice for the owls. Many of the owls looked quite sleepy and sazed and quite a few hid in cool spots and slept. However, these sleepy and slightly zonked looking owls made for some delightfully amusing and charectorful photographs! There were a few curious Jackdaws about too. Sunlight reflections from the cage mesh caused a lot more artifacts in the direct sunshine than would occurr on over cast days, so I had a job with composition and carefull lens placement to mitigate the mesh reflections and artifacts. My 400mm f2.8 helps a lot with disolving the mesh, but the reality is that these are caged animals and the cage creates a lot more work in post production. Overcast light is best, it’s the sort of weather that is great for flowers and is usually best for wildlife or zoo animals. I think a 400mm focal length is propbably the longest you can use at this site. A 600mm will be too long and would be difficult to negotiate the tight spaces, maybe a 300mm f2.8 would be easier to compose within. I like the images I got from my 400mm but I did shoot some images with my 135mm and 100-400mm at around 250-320mm. A 300mm f2.8 would be a good prime option at this site. If you are fortunatly enough to use the new RF 100-300mm f2.8 LIS, that would be a superb “one lens” option.
If you are in the area, I would warmly recommend a visit to the Scottish Owl Centre, it’s a really good and fun day out. Great for kids too.
I visited the Scottish Owl Centre a few years back on a more overcast and cooler day. Here are some of the highlight photos for reference. The owls were more perky and curious and far more interested in the humans poking lenses at them. These were photographed in the month of October, using my older EOS 5Diii and ef 400mm f2.8 LIS mk I, and ef 70-200mm f2.8 LIS II. Great photos, the newer images have more detail and resolution, the raw files have more lattitude. The older camera has a noticebly worse high iso ability, maybe 1.3 stops worse than my R6ii, which is significant. But only about .6 stop worse than my newer R6iii. The R6iii is a noiser camera than my R6ii, that’s the trade off for the extra resolution. However the overall look of the final images are suprisingly similar. The older camera did not have AF eye tracking, but for such an older camera, with a little skill, the results are remarkable. The older mkI lens (ef 400mm f2.8 LIS) seems to output similar look and feeling images. As well as similar sharpness, however the physcial weight differences between the mkI and mkII is significant.
