Burrowing Owl - Salvaging The Takeoff

[Barry Ekstrand]

Canon 5D Mk III, Canon EF 500mm f4L IS II, Canon EF 1.4x III
700 mm, ISO 800, f5.6, 1/2500
Early morning light

Paul McCartney was supposed to start his 2014 tour in Lubbock, TX, home of Buddy Holly, on June 14 - which happens to be our anniversary - so when tickets went on sale a couple of months ago I spent way more than I should have, thinking how can you beat that for an anniversary outing? Bought plane flights (non refundable, of course)... and everyone knows Sir Paul got sick in Japan a month ago and ended up postponing the first US tour dates. So we went to Lubbock anyway, and had a great visit with our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter (but I think Sir Paul should still pay for my flights as I'll have to buy new tickets for the October date that he postponed to....).

But to the real point - as it happens, in my daughter's neighborhood there is a large field populated with Prairie Dogs and Burrowing Owls. Apparently they coexist and share the burrows and tunnels that are all over the field. So this visit I brought my camera gear with an express desire to get some owl shots. I managed to get quite a few good ones, and I'll post some of those, but I am starting with one that I did some work on to salvage it.

I was pretty close to the owl at the time he decided to take off (the crop is relatively small, purely for aesthetics). However, when he leaned forward and took flight I managed to botch the AF point, so his head and face were soft. I've tried to make fix it in PS, please give me your thoughts on whether it was worth trying or not.

Thanks,

Barry

[Loi Nguyen]

Hi Barry, I understand why you are trying to salvage this flight shot. BOs are fast and it is hard to get them in flight with full frame for "normal" people. I have botched the AF many times with these owls. You can sharpen the face by different amount, but you won't be able to bring back the fine details that aren't there. At 100% view, my usual standard is to be able to see the fine details of the feathers. If not, no matter how much i try to salvage it, in my heart of heart I knew the shot was lost. Loi

[arash_hazeghi]

the pose was great, but the soft focus and side light makes it hard to salvage this file. Loi is right that files that are OOF cannot be fixed unfortunately. you can sharpen this one a tad more though and that may improve its appearance at small size

TFS

[Daniel Cadieux]

I really love the habitat and the takeoff pose. I can see why you wanted to salvage it. It does work for small web postings and likely small prints. Anything larger you may have trouble and as Loi says, you will know deep down that the AF had messed up. Bummer about the postponed concert...hope the rescheduled show will be worth it!

[Barry Ekstrand]

Loi, Arash, and Daniel,

Many thanks for the comments. In truth my efforts on this shot was a bit of a PS learning experience, and in retrospect it might have made more sense for me to have posted in the Digital Photography Workflow forum. Here is what I did: the owl was obviously not sharp, with the face being the softest. The frame just prior to this one has the owl leaning forward, getting ready to take flight, and that shot is nice and sharp. I noticed the head angle and size were nearly identical in the two frames, so I decided to try and 'repair' the overly soft face ala a missing wing tip, by cloning the face from the other frame and pasting over the oof one on this shot. It fit perfectly, but no surprise that it stuck out like a sore thumb, very obviously out of sync with the rest of the body. So I worked on sharpening the rest of the body as best I could, then adjusted the opacity of the cloned layer to try to make it blend better. It was still obvious to me but I wanted to get some comments as sometimes we are too close to the end result. In the end it is not a keeper but it was a good PS experience for me. Thanks again for the comments and input!

Barry