Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus)

[Akshay Charegaonkar]

Short-eared Owls are winter migrants to India. They are seen near my home in Mumbai in the month of March, as they are passing through the area on their way back to Europe. They stop to rest and fatten up before moving on in April.

They are found in a field near a very large container warehouse, which I suspect plays host to thousands of rodents. The rodents attract a variety of raptors to the area, including these owls, marsh harriers, Montagu's harriers, pallid harriers, lesser kestrels and black-winged kites.

Photo shot hand-held from a car using a Canon 100-400L lens on a Canon 7D body. 1/320th second at f/5.6, ISO 400. RAW processed in Photoshop CS6. I used selective noise reduction on the background and selective smart sharpening on the bird, using layers. In addition, I played with the levels a little bit to get the golden tone I wanted.

[arash_hazeghi]

I love the light and the eye contact, great view of talons. Feather details look a bit lacking to mt eye though.

A very handsome owl, TFS

[Satish Ranadive]

Absolutely superb image of beautiful owl in nice lights. I like the colors of his eye,view of talons, perch and composition.

Regards,
Satish.

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Awesome shot Akshay! He certainly seems 'fattened-up" :-) Very nicely done.
I like the good look of the eyes, the talons and good angle of view.

[Munish Kaushik]

Fantastic shot. Beautiful light and eye contact. Look at those talons, magnificent. Agree with Arash on feather details. It seems missing.

Regards,
Munish Kaushik

[gail bisson]

I think this is very nice.
I like the rock perch and the stray feather on the belly.
I find the BG a bit distracting and I would tone down the brighter OOF branches.
The owl needs to be sharpened more and I feel the details are probably there. I never use selective smart sharpen. I use unsharp mask at 0.3 pixels and anywhere from amount 30 to 60%.
If you have NIK EFEX PRO I would certainly use the Detail Extractor at 5 to 8% on this image.
Would love to see a repost,
Gail

[adrian dancy]

A very handsome bird indeed.
Some issues have been raised regarding detail/sharpness. It may help if you can let us know the focal length used and the extent of crop, if any. Also you photographed from a car...was the engine left on? did you use a bean bag or did you hand hold the lens and was IS initiated? The body detail on short eared owl can appear soft at the best of times, especially if the bird is facing or crossways in a light breeze because the feathers are so fine and soft and the plumage detail not always presenting as hard edged. However in this image the detail around the face suffers but only slightly. I'm wondering if you might have lost something in processing due to incorrect exposure or processing.

I might say that I photographed a short eared owl a few years ago. I used using a Sigma 300 f2.8 and 1.4 converter plus tripod. There was a bit of a breeze and I had a shutter speed of only 1/30 sec. I had obtained some sharper images on the day but that one image I took and with all its faults became one of my most popular images. Similarly many years ago I once took an image of a Great Tit (on film) and a friend purchased it. After I went digital I felt that I could provide her with a better quality image that I could let her have for free. I couldn't understand why she would not let me replace it with what I thought was a better image. But I have now come to realise that non photographers see things in a different way to photographers and I now understand why my friend would not want to have that original photograph replaced. It just makes me wonder how many photographs we make get binned despite having a potential for being well liked by others and despite what may appear to us as technically flawed imagery.

Edit for spelling.