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A slightly deceptive thread title as there no photos of the ruins of St.Benet's Abbey - which lies in the heart of the Norfolk Broads near Ludham. It also happens to be where the best local congregation of Short-eared Owls are overwintering this year - in fact the only ones I've seen all winter as they seem pretty thin on the ground otherwise in East Norfolk. We had heard that the owls had been attracting a LOT of attention (toggers!) so we had avoided visiting last weekend but as it was such lovely weather yesterday we hoped a mid-week visit would be a bit quieter. We were wrong: the small car park was packed solid with other people parking wherever possible along the access track and camera-laden folk scattered throughout the area. Fortunately most of the best owl-hunting marshes are fenced as a few idiots inevitably decided they couldn't get close enough without trespassing or just trying to get too close to the owls favoured areas. For the most part we just stayed in the car park which overlooks a couple of particularly favoured wet grass marshes with lovely mid-afternoon sun behind us: truly "golden hour" light!
Suffice to say we had a marvellous couple of hours enjoying the owls. There were at least 6 birds in the area although only a couple were utilising the marshes we had staked out. Despite being handicapped by only having one of those rubbishy old OM-1 cameras (just kidding!) we managed some decent shots - a few of which I've added below. One thing you can't fault in the OM-1 is battery life: I ended up with 1210 pics (both RAWs and JPEG's) and still had 62% battery left when we got home. The one "technical" problem I had was that this was only the 3rd or 4th time I had to wait to clear the buffer (the only other times have been photographing hummingbirds in flight) which I guess would have been less of an issue with an OM-1ii. As to AF performance I reckon I had well over 90% sharp shots (all CAF/all point apart from a few SAF/single point when we briefly had an owl perched on a fence post). It's taken a few hours to cull down to the "best" few shots to keep - too easy to keep a lot more.
All shots are with OM-1 150-400mm + internal 1.25x & external 1.4x TC ISO 3200 PP (mostly cropping + sharpening ) using ON1 or DxO PL7.
Suffice to say we had a marvellous couple of hours enjoying the owls. There were at least 6 birds in the area although only a couple were utilising the marshes we had staked out. Despite being handicapped by only having one of those rubbishy old OM-1 cameras (just kidding!) we managed some decent shots - a few of which I've added below. One thing you can't fault in the OM-1 is battery life: I ended up with 1210 pics (both RAWs and JPEG's) and still had 62% battery left when we got home. The one "technical" problem I had was that this was only the 3rd or 4th time I had to wait to clear the buffer (the only other times have been photographing hummingbirds in flight) which I guess would have been less of an issue with an OM-1ii. As to AF performance I reckon I had well over 90% sharp shots (all CAF/all point apart from a few SAF/single point when we briefly had an owl perched on a fence post). It's taken a few hours to cull down to the "best" few shots to keep - too easy to keep a lot more.
All shots are with OM-1 150-400mm + internal 1.25x & external 1.4x TC ISO 3200 PP (mostly cropping + sharpening ) using ON1 or DxO PL7.
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