Northern Saw-whet Owl

[Rick Bowers]

Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus) - Duluth, Minnesota, United States - 15 October

A common fall migrant along Lake Superior.

20D, 100-400, 1/200 sec; f/7.1; ISO 400, flash, vocalization used.
PP- Noise reduction on background, face sharpened, slight vibrance increase and a small oof stick cloned out of the lower left corner, all in CS6.

[Matthew Studebaker]

great pose and eye contact. You certainly know how to photograph those night birds.

[arash_hazeghi]

this is great, love the eye contact and exposure great use of flash. I would tone down the BG a bit and run some NR on it

[Holger Leyrer]

Great pose, exposure and eye contact.

I think BG shows to many details and i see only fir branch. The perch is a "usually" branch. In my eyes that does not fit.

[Jim Crosswell]

I like the pose, big eyes, IQ, exposure and composition. Excellent image Rick!

[Marina Scarr]

Love the look of this owl and you have terrific details. I am with Arash on trying to tone down the BG some.

[Loi Nguyen]

Very cute owl, good sharpness, good use of flash. I think the NR on the BG and the selection of the subject creates an artificial, paste-on look. Toning down the BG would help here. Loi

[Daniel Cadieux]

Awesome! Perhaps a little bright overall, but I love the surprised look and wide open eyes.

[Tom Friedel]

Toning down the background means what here exactly? Desaturation?

[David Salem]

You sure have some nice Owl images Rick and this one is right up there with your best. Love the startled looking stare and the well lit eyes. The feather detail and the perch looks great. Very nice.

[Diane Miller]

The owl is stunning, but the BG competes quite a bit. That's a common situation with flash hitting a BG. You might consider some Selective Color on the greens, to make them closer to the owl's palette, and some reduction of the contrast of the darker areas.

An additional possibility is a crop to minimize the BG and emphasize the owl, but of course that is highly subjective. I'm not particularly advocating it -- just tossed it out as an additional way to minimize BG distraction.

[Diane Miller]

I forgot to mention, your profile is AdobeRGB. Although it is tagged, some older browsers may not honor it correctly. It's always best to convert to sRGB for any web display, and to embed the profile, to cover the most bases with the array of browsers out there.

Converting should not make a noticeable difference in color appearance.