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cover story
GETTING
GETTING
THE BIRD
THE BIRD
Down on the farm for the natural world of owls
Everybody, it seems, loves owls. Folklore has it that they are the wisest of crea- tures, while literature – from Winnie the Pooh to Harry Potter – has typecast them similarly within the public imagination. The reality may be a little more complex, but is not sub- stantially different as Paul Johnson’s film 5 Owl Farm seeks to demonstrate.
Shot over the course of a year on a family-run dairy farm in the Vale of York, the film follows the fortunes of the five domestic species of owl that all occur naturally on the 250 acre spread.
The tawny owl, barn owl, little owl, short-eared owl and long-eared owl are the stars of Johnson’s film, which offers a painstaking view of their lives and the interconnection of their own fortunes with the actions of farmer Andrew Ritchie.
Yet the hardships suffered by the farming community over recent years was most keenly felt during the foot & mouth crisis, but this enforced hiatus actually worked to the benefit of Johnson’s film.
“The owls that we were filming were all wild,” he explains, “so in win- ter 1999, I replaced some nesting boxes and modified some nesting sites
to accommodate lights, microphones and filming windows. Then the owls were actually undisturbed for a year to let them get used to their new ‘inte- rior design’.
“When I came back 12 months later the owls had established them- selves very nicely. Then when I turned the lights up and got the cameras in they behaved perfectly naturally, so what you see is what owls do. They helped to write the storyline because they’ve done some remarkable things in front of the camera.”
The fact that the owl is primarily nocturnal poses several problems when shooting on film, but the choice of film over video was a simple one for Johnson and his producer Andrew Cooper.
“It was something we had to con- sider,” Johnson adds. “Clearly we did- n’t want to end up with too much grain or images that were not of a high enough standard.
“The owl film is for the Natural World strand at the BBC so it all comes down to quality of image. I elected to use the Fuji 64 for most of the daytime actions around the farm. And I used the 250 daylight for the twi- light, early morning and evening shots, as well as those in the nest sites. I used a little bit of the Fuji 400
low contrast in one of the sites, a Norman Church.
“The brown colours and the grain structure of that fine detail in the church interior was fine, and it han- dled the contrasts form the bright stained glass windows very nicely. Using Zeiss Superspeed prime lenses I’ve been able to film them hunting, raising their young and being active around the film in that twilight and early dawn light.”
Johnson’s own interest in owls goes back to childhood when he dis- covered that one had fallen down the chimney of his family home. It is an interest that has turned into an endur- ing fascination.
“Even people who claim not to like birds like owls,” he continues, “they’ve
got a universal popularity, especially at the moment. But, of course, a lot of people don’t know very much about them, they don’t know which owl is which so the film will hopefully also shed light on to peoples’ understand- ing of what owls are, where they are, what they do and what they feed on.”
Such details will change, Johnson understands very clearly, depending on circumstances. With wisdom comes an ability to adapt.
“Whatever’s written in the refer- ence books you have to take with a pinch of salt, because each owl is an individual and within groups of owls I’ve found you’ll get some
that are more tolerant than others of hunting during daylight, and things like that.
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