Burrowing Owl Portrait

[Loi Nguyen]

Image taken at Salton Sea, California last month. This is a male. He came out of the burrow and saw me and expressed some agitation, but his mate accepted me, so eventually he settled down. For more than 1 hour, they were just standing in front of the burrow, not hunting or anything, just sunning themselves. So I left to them to their own.

1DX
500f4 II + 1.4X III = 700mm
1/2000
f9
ISO-1000
Handheld

Cropped all around for comp, final image ~ 60% of FF

Thank you for your comments.

Loi

[keith mitchell]

Hello loi, the face does look a bit over sharpened on my monitor but that could be my eyes:2eyes2: that apart I really like the pose and the bg,a real good looking image.

Keith.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Loi,

Nice stance, and it's good to see the stare in your direction.

The shadows in the eyes are a bit of a bummer, but not much you could do about that.

Miguel

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Nice owl and pose. I would saturate the colours a tad more and decrese the light slider as the image appears a tad bright.

[David Salem]

Nice shot Loi and I like the stare and the fact that the eyes are completely lit. The detail looks good to me but I too think it needs a slight decrease in exposure, maybe a third. Nice work.

[Glenn Conlan]

Great shot, as previously stated a bit bright

[Troy Lim]

Nice one.

[Loi Nguyen]

Thank you everyone for your comments. I reduced the exposure by 0.22EV (the white is now at 228), cropped a wee bit on both left and right to avoid some distracting highlights in the BG, and back off on UMS. Before 100/0.3/0 => 80/0.3/0. It was a pretty sharp image to begin with :)

Loi

[Frank Schauf]

Great pose and setting you have here.

[keith mitchell]

Loi the first post was very good, but the repost looks better to me.

[Holger Leyrer]

Hi Loi,

nice pose and wonderful eye contact. The repost works better as the OP. Well done, Loi