Burrowing Owls

[John Hawkins]

Photographed early this morning. Cape Coral off Mohawk near the Library. They no longer hide when I first show up They are getting used to me. I think they appreciated me shooing away a pesky Mockingbird which kept swooping down on the whole family. I think the Mockingbird has a nest not far from the Owls. I used my Sony A100 with a Sigma 50-500 lens on a tripod. The data= f/5.6, 1/50, +1.0 ev, ISO 400, 160mm. Thanks for looking and C & C's welcomed. John

[Tony Whitehead]

Cute poses, John. Image looks quite contrasty and not quite sharp. Obviously not a lot of light needing 1/50s, f5.6 and ISO 400 - not sure what the Sony is like at higher ISO - would 800 have been an option?

[Arthur Morris]

Great poses and expressions but after that it is all downhill. You cannot live by cute alone. Not quite sharp. Color balance seems way off. BKGR is distracting and BKGR and legs looks way over-sharpened. All in all image quality is poor at best. Not sure of the cause....

[John Hawkins]

Artie,
I tried my hand at photoshop but apparently I need lots more practice. Here is the original, straight from camera. The histogram looked fine, nothing hitting either end, looks like a small centered hump, not too high, equal boths sides ( I tried to copy the graph but can't figure how to get from the aperture program). Should I have used different settings?
Thanks,
John

[Arthur Morris]

Hi John,

The histogram looks fine. The highlights are right on the edge. You actually made your image far worse in Photoshop. The idea is to make them look better! :) :) :)

The image quality and sharpness are suspect at best and it appears that the lens has very poor and strange BOKEH, the degree of smoothness to detailed BKGRs. Your BKGR looks very jangly. In your original post, you oversharpened the image by miles. And made it much too contrasty.

Above is your original optimized by me. Everything that I did to the image is in our Digital Basics file, a PDF that we send by e-mail to folks who send us $20 :) The only thing that I did that was not a true basic was to de-SAT and darken the pupils using a Quick Mask. (Also in DB.)

Let me know what you think.

[Steve Canuel]

Hi John,
Since I spent a lot of my early learning days shooting these guys (and making lots of mistakes), I'd thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. Although your original file looks a little soft, the posted pic seems to suffer more from PP than initial capture. The BG, with its mottled appearance due to bright rocks and sticks, makes it hard fro the owls, who are made to blend in, stand out. Your original in camera file isn't that bad and should be easy to work with. With feathers, especially soft ones on fledling owlets, you can get away with a little softness in the initial capture. Biggest problem I see is that the eyes and beaks are a little soft. YOu appear to have used a pretty slow shutter speed. Maybe bumping up your ISO and dealing with the increased noise would've been a better option. These are just my opinions based on my own experiences, I've had no formal training :) If you want to keep the image, maybe take it in an intentional soft direction and tell people you were going for "artsy". Here's a quick version.

[John Hawkins]

Thanks Artie and Steve you both are kind to give me direction. I will try again this weekend. Artie, I do have your Digital basics file and will have to review it. Thanks, John