Hi - This is a gray morph Screech Owl that I found behind our house in some thick bushes near where the owl nestbox was.
There were some Bluejays making alot of noise and my Dad and I grabbed my camera and we went to see if it was an owl.
I made a mistake on this one, though, and I set my ss too high thinking that he would fly when he saw me, and I wanted to capture that.
But he just sat there. So, my aperture was too low for a portrait shot, and my ss was too high. Also there was alot of leaves to shoot through and around.
I cropped about 25% and did some noise reduction on the background, twice. Then I increased the saturation on the eyes and sharpened the owl a bit.
I hear a few of these owls at night making a lot of noise in our yard, so I know they're still around. I'm going to try to find him again on Sunday. I have a photo of the rufous one from May, but its kind of hidden in some leaves and a bit dark. I cleaned out the nest box so I hope they come back again.
Ashley, good to see you continue to have luck with owls. The OOF leaves are distracting and I would suggest a vertical crop to focus more on the owl. F2.8 DOF is very shallow as you already know, so it is tough to keep everything in focus. Your ISO is 320, I see many people here on this Forum shoot beautiful images with the 7D at ISO-800. Loi
love the eye contact and the natural vignetting. very cool.
he does look a bit soft, I think it is because your view was partially block by some leaves and branches...not much you could do about that. well done!
A nice subject here; you are so lucky to have such a bird in your garden! I think your self assessment is correct. However, given your close proximity to the bird and the busy nature of the habitat it would have been unlikely that you would have succeeded on a successful flight image. So your effort might have been better spent 'working the bird'. Closing down the lens And changing ISO may have allowed you to get a bit more detail whilst still retaining the owls 'secret world' look. I do like images of birds or animals peering through vegetation with shallow depth of field but the face (particularly the eyes) and surrounding features need to be critically focused and sharp.
I presume the camera/lens was hand held and you were on Al servo and there was no breeze?
Eastern Screech Owl (gray morph)
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Originally Posted by Ashleigh Scully
