Snowy Owl

[Ashleigh Scully]

Hi -

I photographed a beautiful young female Snowy Owl on a beach in NJ this weekend! I still can't believe it.

It was so cold I only stayed for about an hour and I got maybe 300 shots. This one is my favorite although I do have some others that are OK.

Canon 5D MIII
Canon 500mm f/4L IS II USM + 1.4x III

Manual Exposure

700mm
ISO 160
f/6.3
1600s

I did some rubber-stamping in PHotoshop to remove some darker spots in the sand, then I isolated the owl and did a Sharpener Pro 3 on it just to try it compared to USM in Photoshop.

I would love to know how maybe to get more detail out of the face feathers.

Thanks so much for looking and have a great Thanksgiving everyone :)

[Ashleigh Scully]

Oops, I cropped this a lot, probably 40% I cropped out of it.

[Faraaz Abdool]

Hi Ashleigh,

This is a fantastic shot, I love the low POV and the look-back pose you got here. I'm thinking (I can't see too well from here) that maybe the owl's face was a bit hot, and that's why you may have lost some detail. Still an excellent shot of a species I am yet to see.

[Bill Dix]

Great work, Ashleigh. I love the eye, and the nice oof bg. I opted not to go to The Hook after hearing that the rangers were keeping photographers so far away that decent shots were impossible. I was obviously misled; this is lovely. Maybe she'll stick around.

[Diane Miller]

You don't say what your raw processing was. If LR or ACR, you might bring up a little more detail by careful lowering of Exposure and Highlights (on the original RAW file, not the PS file), and then in PS go to Nik's Detail Extractor. You might need to mask that just to the lightest areas. That would improve the image a lot, in my estimation. It's a great find! Good work to get the shot!

[keith mitchell]

Hi Ashleigh, can't help a lot with the loss of detail but it does look a tad warm apart from that it looks very good ,love the low angle that you have got.

Keith.

[Shawn Zierman]

Gorgeous owl. Exposure work looks solid to me. At this working distance, the details on the facial disk are just fine. You could do some masking with a multi pass approach to the sharpening to fine tune the details on the facial disk, but honestly, it looks just fine as is to my eye. The setting is pretty lackluster here, and the beach debris is not helping. I like the low shooting angle, just wish you had been able to incorporate some other bg element/color, or something of visual interest other than just the owl into this one. The head angle of the bird could be better, as just as a matter of personal taste, I would rather not see the snippet of the bird's left eye, as there is too little showing to be adequate, but just enough showing to show that there is too little showing if you follow :) If you want more detail on the facial disk, decrease your working distance by either getting physically closer or using more focal length....

[Marina Scarr]

Lovely pose and light. Head could use some more sharpening. If it weren't a 40% crop, I would suggest a crop off of the bottom.

[Ashleigh Scully]

Thank you everyone. I have some ideas on another Snowy Owl photo to post this weekend that I can try some of your suggestions on. Thank you again

[Daniel Cadieux]

Congratulations on a special sighting!! I agree with Shawn and Marina's comments, and I'm looking forward to what else you got :-)