Text and pictures by Hanne & Jens Eriksen
Take a look at the picture above of a Little Owl (Athene noctua) sitting on a rock and facing an almost full moon. What a stroke of luck the photographer had in finding such a scene, you might think. Well, not quite. In this first article in our series of contributions about wildlife photography in Arabia, Hanne and Jens Eriksen, award winning photographers presently based in the Sultanate of Oman, explain how they achieved such a remarkable image using simple techniques and genuine team-work.
The picture is an example of a double-exposure - two pictures on the same frame. Not by accident, but by design.
We had been following a family of Little Owls near our home in Muscat for several days. Two adults and five fully grown young lived in a wadi with steep rocky sides. It was fairly easy to get close to the owls and one afternoon we managed to get several pictures. A typical one is also shown here, the one of the owl sitting in the sunshine. We noticed that one of the owls often favoured a particular rock. In the afternoon sunshine however it was not possible to get a good picture as the terrain did not permit us to position ourselves between the sun and the owl. It then occurred to us that we could 'construct' an interesting image as a double exposure. This is how it was done.
The first picture was taken with a Nikon Nikkor 500mm f4P lens. The camera was a Nikon F4s which, like most modern cameras, allows you to take a picture without advancing the film to the next frame when a small lever on the camera is pulled. In order to give the impression of night we underexposed the picture by three f stops, so that the owl would just be a silhouette against the afternoon sky. We carefully composed the picture so that the owl, which was facing left on the rock, was positioned in the right hand side of the frame. We then packed up our gear and left the area. Several hours later in our own backyard we added the moon onto the left side. The moon shot was taken with the 500mm lens fitted with a Nikon 1.4 teleconverter, effectively producing a 700mm f5.6 lens, thus giving a larger image of the moon and a more dramatic picture. The exposure time was 14 second at f5.6. The moon could probably have been sharper if we had locked up the camera mirror beforehand. With the long exposure time even the slightest shaking will blur the picture. A sturdy tripod was used for both exposures.
Is double exposure cheating? We don't think so. On the contrary it lets you create pictures that would otherwise be impossible. It certainly would not be possible to get both the moon and the owl in focus in a single exposure shot. This was indeed a joint effort as one of us took the owl picture and the other added the moon.
Arabian Wildlife. Volume 1, Number 2