This adorable forehead belongs to a Boreal Owl, also known as Tengmalm’s Owl.
Description from All About Birds
In the dark of the night, the small Boreal Owl comes alive in the spruce and fir forests of northern North America and Europe. This bright-eyed, square faced owl sits and waits on a perch for small mammals and birds before gliding down talons first to grab it. From late winter through spring, its quick, hollow hooting sounds across the dark forest as the male calls for a mate. They spend the year in boreal forests, occasionally making their way farther south in years of prey scarcity.
Unless it was completely faked, the photographer likely has no choice for this. Lowering the aperture to get a wider depth of field wou reduce the amount of light significantly to either introduce motion blur (if not on a tripod) or significant noise. Also, this sort of angle on a telephoto lens would be very difficult to not blur out
Unless it is faked in, it’s difficult to tell though
Thanks for the insight. I’m not a photographer, so I try hard to weed out fake pics, I’m just interested in sharing real owls.
I get a lot of stories from animal rescues off their Facebook feeds, so I get recommended all these “owl photos” where most are very unlikely to be real, but some like this are plausible, but I try to trace them back to an actual person. This was listed by a million reposts as being by EE Photography, which I couldn’t find anywhere.
The pic is simple enough, and isn’t showing anything unrealistic, so I figured what the heck. It’s a fun pic I think, so this one made the cut.
When I say faked I more specifically mean the depth of field being faked which I would be very surprised if it was
Ooo I gotcha now. I do appreciate the insight though, my photography knowledge is very limited, so even though I don’t totally understand, it’s more than I knew before!
Pretty much, if I was shooting this with my D850 and 200-500mm at 500mm and f/7.2 and the owl was 20ft away the total depth of field would be 2.3 inches 5.8cm. That’s half that in front of the plane of focus and half behind. That’s about as shallow as I would want to go and so looking at that image I think it’s shot at maybe 300mm