Pair of spotted owlet

[Gautam Biswas]

Created this image of a pair of spotted owlet in Bandhavgarh National Park, India.Couldn't avoid the wound highlights in the BG, don't know how much of a distraction it is?
Image created with a Canon 5D with a 400mm f5.6L lens at ISO 640, f5.6 and 1/250s
Comments welcome

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great find and setting, nice to have both in the frame. The birds look a bit soft on my monitor and I would remove the bright spots in the BG.

[Jody Melanson]

Love the composition and eye contact from both. Agree they look soft and would clone out bright spots.

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Great find and wonderful to see the two together . I echo the above comments about it appearing a bit soft .

[Glenn Bartley]

Really nice capture. I would definitely clone out the sun spots and I think you could tweak this image to make it pop a bit more. Try adjusting the saturation and maybe a curves adjustment to bring the darks up a touch.

[Jason Ambler]

Gautam,

Cool capture! If you are somewhere at the lower end of the learning curve as far as bird photography is concerned than I am quite a bit lower than you. So with that in mind I hope you do not mind a little CS3 manipulation of your image on my part. Fast play with the image using the critique advice of the mods and members. Curves, cloned out bright spots (area around branch was fast and ugly just for a quick look) and a little unsharp mask.

Jason

[Gautam Biswas]

Thank you all Axel, Judy, Jody, Glenn for your comments and suggestions. Jason, your skills in PS are sure better than mine. While I can take out the sun spots with the clone tool, it gets tricky with the ones partially behind the tree branch. Did you you use masking. Would be interested to learn the steps you took took to clone out the bright spots.