Boundary Bay is the occasional destination of Snowy Owls. These birds do travel south in the winter, but Vancouver is about as far as any will go. The bird pictured here is young, Snowy Owls get lighter with age. The younger birds tend to travel further south than the older ones and occasionally one might venture as far as California, because it doesn't yet know where to stop!
This image was made using Kodachrome 200 film. This film has considerable grain so in the downloaded images we have blurred the out-of-focus areas in our computer to reduce the graininess of the picture. With our digital camera, ISO 200 is nearly noise free and would now be our first choice over film for this type of photograph. A 600mm lens was coupled with a 2X teleconverter to effectively give 24X magnification at the camera. A very heavy tripod was needed. This allowed us to capture this image without having to approach the bird too closely.