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Spotlight
Jean
Owens
“I’ve always loved taking pictures”
Jean Owens spots her subject,
lifts the camera slowly to her eye,
holds her breath and squeezes
the shutter release; then she
does it again for good measure.
She then drops to one knee, turns
the camera vertically and shoots again,
twice. As she rises, Owens looks to the
left and right for a different, perhaps
better angle and tramps off toward her
next photo.
It’s this attention to detail that recently
helped Owens garner more than
$1,300 in prize money from a national
magazine. Country staffers picked her
photo as a finalist for the publication’s
annual Rural Photography Contest.
The rest was up to the online voting
public who chose Owens’ picture of
Carson and Carrigan Tucker as the
grand prizewinner.
A lifetime of practice
Although she’s only been competing
in contests since 2008, Owens has
been honing her craft since childhood.
“I’ve always loved taking pictures,”
said the Henry County native. “I had
a little Brownie camera when I was 12
years old and have a lockbox full of
negatives at the bank.” She became
more serious in the early nineties
when her husband Rick presented her
with “a really nice Nikon 35-millimeter
camera. Of course, that was a film
camera,” she said.
Owens was “thrilled” when digital
photography became the norm. “I
wanted a camera that was smaller and
lighter than my big film camera. I got
a little one, but it didn’t take me long
to get back to a large professional size
digital camera.”
45,000 and counting
While digital photos don’t produce
negatives which have to be stored,
they still present their own issues.
With 45,000 digital images, Owens
admitted that it’s “often hard to push
the delete button. If it’s blurry, I delete
it. If someone’s eyes are closed, I delete
it. Past that, I download the photos to
my computer and save them to a flash
drive - actually many flash drives.”
Tricks of the trade
Wildlife and country scenery are
Owens’ favorite subjects. In fact, she
has five PARIS! covers to her credit, all
of which were shot off the beaten path
in the wilds of Henry County. She’s
never happier than when she’s photographing
old barns, fields brimming
with cotton, ducks splashing in a pond
or a new mule colt.
Along with patience and a good
zoom lens, Owens employs other
tricks of the trade. She has her own
hunting blind, and at home she has
birdfeeders set up next to the house.
She photographs birds without even
raising the windows.
Owens has attended numerous
local photography seminars over the
years and taken several classes. She
recently began learning Photoshop
techniques, but said that none of her
winning photos were digitally altered.
“I’ve always worked hard to take
great pictures without Photoshop,”
she said, adding, “Anyone can take
great photographs if they’ll read their
camera manual, keep a few basic tips
in mind and practice.”
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