Great Horned Owl

[Jason Lee]

Canon 7D

Canon 400mm F5.6

1/160 second

F 5.6

ISO 800

Image was taken from a tripod, focus achieved manually using "live view" 5X magnify, fired by remote.

[Randy Stout]

Jason:

Your owl is sharp and well exposed, with great eye contact. The lighting was fairly soft which helps as well.

The branches and trunks in the foreground do detract for me. If the IQ will allow, might try some cropping to reduce that effect some.

Cheers

Randy

[arash_hazeghi]

nice eye contact, the owl is somewhat small in the frame and the tree trunk on the right is distracting as Randy mentioned.

[Karl Egressy]

Nice scene and the bird looks good. I find the OOF branch in gront of the large tree trunk and the right side OOF tree trunk somewhat distracting.
Using higher number f stop could have been the answer, but then you might not have had enough shutter speed. (f 7.1 or f 8.0)

[Marina Scarr]

I am really enjoying the environmental feel to this one, trees and all. The bird is nice and sharp and well exposed. The owl truly pops against the green leaves and I like the way he is gazing at his photographer. I also like the angle of the tree trunk to its right, our left. Well done with a tricky situation.

[Amol Khedgikar]

I like this a lot and everything that Marina said.

The foreground is too busy, The bird is small in the frame and branches and trunk are seen more than desired. (A larger crop since you got the bird sharp?) I also wish you were a little towards your right, just enough to stop the bird's right horn touching the branch (In the picture of course).