Burrowing owl

[Juan Fernandez]

I took this picture last week, at Cape Coral, FL, early in the morning. Very cooperative guy so I spent some time with him.

Canon 7D II
Canon 500mm
f5.6
1/640 sec
ISO 400
Very minor crop.
I applied (selectively to the bird) a NIK recipe suggested by Artie a couple weeks ago (BAA 04/09/18)

30% Detail Extractor, 30% Tonal Contrast, and Pro Contrast with 5% Correct Contrast and 20% Dynamic Contrast

Resized the image using Andreas Resch script

As always, comments and critiques are welcomed and encouraged!
Thanks for looking,
Juan

[Mike Quigley]

I love the detail and the sharpness, nicely done.

[John Mack]

The Pose on the bird is nice. Would like some more room below. Maybe overall a little too tight in the frame.

[Dorian Anderson]

Nice close-up of this guy, though I do agree with giving him more room in the frame. He's cramped as is. Also, something is off on the bird as well as Burrowing Owls
are generally whiter/brighter than this bird. This guy looks very gray, and I don't know if that is a sharpening artifact or something to do with highlight levels. Image
could probably be warmed up as he looks pretty steely now.

[Juan Fernandez]

Thanks to all for your comments.
I will have to add canvas as I don't have much more space in the original. I will look at other frames from the same bird.
@Dorian: I will play around with the color temperature. I see what you mean by the gray in some of the feathers. Looking at the original the brown is lighter but the whites do have this gray cast. When boosting the contrast it makes it more pronounced.

[Joseph Przybyla]

Hi Juan, beautiful bird, nice to see they survived the hurricane. Not to rain on the parade because nobody else mentioned it but something looks off on the post processing. The owl in general looks crunchy, maybe over sharpening or post processing. The feather that extends to the right as viewed above the birds left wing is out of focus compared to other areas that appear to be in the same plane of depth of field. Also there is a shadow or halo above it. The bottom of the bird above the sand mound looks funky, it seems to go out of focus to abruptly. What I see, others I am sure will see it differently. Thank you for sharing.