Burrowing Owl

[Joseph Przybyla]

Recently I have viewed many wonderful images of owls on this forum. Here is one of mine. It is a little owl , only about 8 inches tall. They live in burrows dug into sand embankments, using them to escape the heat of the day in Florida. This is one of many images I captured in Cape Coral, Florida. In that city most of the vacant lots are used by these owls.

Nikon D7000
Nikon 70-300mm 4-506 VRII AF shot at 300mm
1/400
F8
ISO280

[Henry Domke]

A nice portrait well composed.
The natural setting with flowers works well.
My only concern is the greens. They look unreal to me, almost "radioactive".

How did you process this image?

[Joseph Przybyla]

Hello Henry, thank you for viewing and commenting. Looking at the image the greens do look overpowering. The background was a grassy park, green grass. The post processing was in Lightroom with only a little Vibrance added. I lowered the saturation of the green and re-posted here. Thank you for pointing out the distracting green.

[Henry Domke]

I lowered the saturation of the green and re-posted here.
That helps but perhaps it has gone a bit too far. It would be nice if the foreground and bird had a bit more saturation.
Might be a place where you could use some local adjustments in Lightroom; perhaps a graduated filter and a radial filter.
Or, you could do it more precisely in Photoshop if that is part of your workflow.

[John Robinson]

Hi Joseph. I,ll go along with Henry on this- somewhere in between. These are so much like our Little Owls Only seen them in Zoos over here where they seem to breed in quite small areas/aviaries. They seem to sit there all day looking at people !!
Cheers
John

[Jim Crosswell]

I like the setting, eye contact and composition. Some good suggestions above to improve this image. Nice image Joe.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Thank you all for taking time to view and offer advise and suggestions. Here is the image with saturation added to the owl and the foreground. I used the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to mask the owl and foreground and then applied saturation to those areas as looked appropriate.

[Henry Domke]

Thank you all for taking time to view and offer advise and suggestions. Here is the image with saturation added to the owl and the foreground. I used the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to mask the owl and foreground and then applied saturation to those areas as looked appropriate.
MUCH better!