Burrowing Owl

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon 400/5.6 HH
1/5000 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400
Sharpening and small crop for comp in CS6

[Loi Nguyen]

very nice capture, Ian. These guys are fast. the square crop is a bit ackward IMHO. You may want to consider using Curves to brighten the shadow area a tad. Loi

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Loi. I wrestled with the crop on this one. Not having any clouds (a typical Phoenix sky) makes the BG boring and the shape of the bird was hard to make look good in a rectangular crop. I may go back in with Curves and/or Viveza and work on the dark areas.

[Diane Miller]

Wonderful capture! The shadow area isn't too dark, to me, but if I wanted to explore what might be brought out there, I'd use the Shadows slider in LR / ACR, balanced of course with the other sliders in the Basic panel. Using Curves on a rasterized file is working with much less tonal information and precision. It will affect the image globally more than the Shadows slider will.

But what is your raw processor?

A little more on the left could be good but it's fine, for me, as posted.

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Diane. I use ACR for RAW processing, although I keep telling myself that I should become more familiar with DPP.

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Diane. I use ACR for RAW processing, although I keep telling myself that I should become more familiar with DPP.

[Diane Miller]

I think ACR / LR (the same engine) is the best processor there is for extracting the tonal information that the camera can capture. I downloaded and installed the new DPP and it crashed (on Mac OS Lion) as soon as I opened it. Maybe I'll try it again -- someday.

Whatever detail was in your shadows should be able to be brought out by the sliders in the Develop module of LR, as well as anything can. And a little more can probably be found in Nik's Detail extractor. Masking adjustments in the PS file would be the next step. But I can't criticize what you have here.

It's hard to see in the small JPEGs presented here, but you might try Nik's Detail Extractor on this image (the master PS file, not the JPEG) and mask that layer to the shadow area only. You might increase small-scale contrast there and pull out a little more detail.

Of course, there is a noise penalty in bringing up darks with any software, due to the nature of digital capture (lower signal to noise ratio at lower exposures). In my experience, the noise reduction tools we have today compare very well to the supposed improvement in noise by initial processing in DPP. NR comes at a price, even with Canon's own software.

[Tobie Schalkwyk]

Whatever detail was in your shadows should be able to be brought out by the sliders in the Develop module of LR, as well as anything can.

Agreed - it's as if it was built for situations like this.

Nice pic Ian - I don't find the bird's position that bad - it makes up for it with that stare right into your eyes! Beautiful - I just love it!

[David Kenny]

The eye contact is great on this one. The wing pose shows good feather detail. I am not to sure if the crop is working for me though. I feel it could loose some room on the bottom IMHO.

- Dave

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, David. I didn't crop the bottom as I wanted a little flying space.

[Arthur Morris]

Though I am not a fan of boxy crops I rather like this one and think that you did a fine job with it. Love the look at the near wing.

[Jim Keener]

Wham! No wonder you backed away. Of course you were likely being respectful, but whatever the motivation, I'd back away if I saw those big eyes looking at me. I'm trying to think of something to write that might help improve the image, but I can't. I simply enjoy looking at it.