I've cropped away 25% of the original raw photo. I centered the owl intentionally. I just didn't like the way he looked off center. It seemed to detract from the power of his pose.
1/50 sec at f /5.6
no exposure compensation
no fill flash (hadn't bought one yet when I took this photo back in 2004)
Aperture Priority
Pattern Metering
ISO 400
400mm on the Canon 100-400 IS USM
Camera at the time was a Canon EOS Digital Rebel
My digital editing aside from normal tweaks during raw conversion consisted of quick masking the owl and branch out in order to apply a slight gaussian blur to the background as well as selective shadow/highlights and sharpening on the foreground.
This picture was taken in the forest of Caw Caw Interpretive Center in Charleston, SC 6/19/04.
Hi Allen Fully agree on centering the bird Good work in PS just see some halo around the perch Might lighten the bird a bit and increase contrast (not much) I like the sharpness and straight in look I know how difficult these guys are to get Fine image !!! Hoping to see lots more !!!
Beautiful bird! I like the colors and the detail of this bird, and the eyes are sweet! As far as centering I would like to see both but understand your point. A little flash here could have rendered your BG a little darker if you stopped down the lens a little and let the flash light up the bird. The BG is the only thing that bothers me here, not bad but a little too bright in spots which takes your eye away from the bird. Don't get me wrong, this is a nice image!
allen -
a great 1st post
technically correct for all the reasons cited above and i'd also have left the bird centred
As for the bright highlights in the background - if you'd have used a fill-flash and stopped down, it might have darkened the leaves, but suspect the bright sunny spots might have been even more pronounced. I had a similar post in AWF on jan 5th around 2pm asking the experts how to deal with similar bright HL's in a photo of an aracari. SH adjustments often don't work well on really sunny HL spots. In the replies, a good before and after image showed the effects of using lens blur ( rather than gaussian blur) to help the photo. To really neutralize them necessitates creating a second mask layer with an image opened -1.5 to -2EV to recover the detail in the HL areas and then selectively painting them into a composite photo or using HDR software. To me, they aren't worth all that effort.
I like the fact , intentional or not, that the owl was centered on the tree trunk (possibly a smidge more to the right). I think it would have been distracting if the darker area of the trunk had shown up more with the highlights included. Otherwise I think one half of the bird would have been rimmed by the dark trunk and the other half would have had the lighter highlights around it.
Barred Owl
