Juvenile Eastern Screech Owl

[Anthony Barsotti]

This is a shot I've been dying to get for quite a while, Eastern Screech Owls are my absolute favorite bird and to be able to see a juvenile was incredible. This was taken just after dusk so available light was pretty scarce. I shot this with my Canon 1DX, 600mm f/4 IS II wide open at 1/5sec and ISO 3200, manually focused via live view as my camera would have just hunted if I tried to use AF. Processed it in Camera Raw just to balance the exposure and then I brought it into Topaz Labs DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI (currently testing out those plugins, haven't quite gotten the hang of them yet but I'm pretty impressed). A few basic adjustment layers were applied too afterwards to brighten the bird a tiny bit and to darken the background slightly. Hope you enjoy it, thanks for looking!

[Daniel Cadieux]

Apart form the techs, the eyes give us a clue of dark it was (check out how dilated the pupils are). The angle is a bit steep but still not too bad - had the owl looked down directly towards you that would have helped with that. Good comp. OK BG. There is a magenta cast on the owl that should be easy enough to fix. Pretty cute overall, and I can see why you are excited about having had this opportunity.

[Krishna Prasad kotti]

I love the eyes. Color cast has already been mentioned.
I do feel image quality is lacking. How much of a crop is this ?

[John Mack]

Agree with what Daniel has said here. But those eyes are killer.

[William Dickson]

Yes, if you fix that colour cast, this would improve the image a lot. Love the facial expression.

Will

[Dorian Anderson]

The eyes are fabulous and the color cast is an easy fi, but overall image quality is pretty rough. There is little detail in the feathers as presented, but it looks like you were up against it with the light from your data. This image was going to struggle without some flash.

[Anthony Barsotti]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I’ve been trying to correct that magenta cast and I need to tweak it a little more, trying not to overdo it with the green but I think it’s close. Image quality is definitely not as great as I’d like it to be, there was a tiny bit of motion blur that I was able to work with in Sharpen AI and it did a pretty decent job of fixing it but I need to play with it some more. There’s some weird crunchiness and aliasing going on that I’m not crazy about, still haven’t quite figured out these Topaz Labs plugins. I think downsizing it to upload it here degraded the quality a bit too, it’s not a very heavy crop and definitely doesn’t look as bad in a full quality export.

[Anthony Barsotti]

Started over with the edit for this shot and I think I like it a lot more now. The only adjustments I made in Camera Raw first were fixing the WB which removed the magenta cast and I boosted shadows by 50. Then I put it in DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI but I was much more conservative with those. Added a few adjustment layers in Photoshop just for curves on the bird, overall contrast, etc. Opted for a wider crop too which I think helps mitigate some of the IQ issues with my first attempt.