Screech Owl Fledgling

[Ashleigh Scully]

Bittersweet day yesterday as we watched the two screech owls leave the nest box. They were perched in a nearby tree for a few minutes then fluttered off over a fence into a neighboring property, from where one of the adults called out.

Ashleigh was on her own with this one. Looked like she tried to compensate for the lack of light under the canopy and applied a very slow shutter speed. Interested in your feedback on this, and her technicals.

Slight adjustment to saturation, 15% cropped off for composition, minor Unsharpen Mark.

Canon 7D
Canon 300mm f/2.8
ISO 640, 300mm, f/5.6, 1/80s

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Ashleigh, great eye contact, and looks like the owlet is well aware of you. Pretty large feet for their age. The light behind the owlet looks fine, but I would tone down the area below the branch/perch. With regards to sharpness, I would try and selectively sharpen the owlet, and see if you achieve good results. Its not too bad for the ss you had.

[dankearl]

The sharpness looks good to me, a nice pose and the feet are great.
Run some NR on the BG, it is noisy but an easy fix to smooth it out.
Nice work.

[arash_hazeghi]

This is very cool! she did well. not bad at all for such low shutter speed. there is some motion blur and noise in the BG but the eye contact is great. did she have a good tripod?

[Loi Nguyen]

Hi Ashley, the eyes look sharp to me. Good eye contact. Lighting was not ideal, you handled the shadow well, the highlights are a bit bright. As for comp, the big perch is quite prominent in the frame. I assume it was not possible for you to position yourself with the light behind your back. I find that it is often better to align myself with the light and just wait for the right moment when the bird turns around. It may or may not, but it is a gamble that I find often pay off. Loi

[Daniel Cadieux]

A sweet moment you had, must have been a thrill! I like the image overall, and you've had some good advice so far. You could try warming up the white balance a tad (at least on the owl and perch) to get the bluish cast out.

[Marina Scarr]

Great work on capturing an elusive species at this low shutter speed! Here's a quick RP. I adjusted the color balance on all 3 scales until it looked right, burned the right side of the bird and sharpened the owlet a little more.