Mark IV + Barred Owl = Awesome!

[Doug Brown]

Leave it to Jim Neiger to find and befriend a pair of Barred Owls. When he brings his boat into their territory and plays their call, these 2 birds show up like clockwork. The photography is decidedly difficult. Dappled light, a varied BG, a short distance to lock onto the bird, the bird flying right at you, and doing it all off of a boat. I was very pleased with the number of keepers I got; this was a definite AF torture test.



Canon 1D Mark IV, 500mm, f/5.6, 1/1600, ISO 800, manual exposure, hand held from boat

[susanschermer]

Leave it to Jim to get you those barred owls. This one is so neat head-on and eye-contact. Of course, your skills bring a lot to the situation.

[Ofer Levy]

Awesome image indeed!! Very sharp with great eye contact.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Doug, great job in challenging conditions. Loved the head on pose and sharpness. Awesome DOF too. Nice off-center placement of the owl.

[Stu Bowie]

Excellent head on shot Doug, and the sharpness in this simply outstanding. The owl is seperated so well from the BG too. Congrats.

[david cramer]

Beautiful in every respect.

[arash_hazeghi]

Excellent Doug, sharp with great pose and a nice BG. I agree it is a torture test locking on BIF coming right at you!!! can you post a 100% crop of the head area?

[Doug Brown]

can you post a 100% crop of the head area?

I should have just posted the 100% crop at the same time as the processed version for you Arash. Here you go. LR processing only with default sharpening.

[arash_hazeghi]

This is A+ flight crop Doug, can't focus any better in this condition.

What AF mode did you use for this?



Did you bait the owl BTW :D ?

[Ilija Dukovski]

Superb in every aspect, the wing pose is just perfect.

[Doug Brown]

I used AI Servo with tracking sensitivity set to slow, and had C.Fn III 8 set to 2 (surrounding AF points). We used a call only; no baiting.

[Doug Brown]

Here's another owl flight shot 100% crop. This one has had no LR processing at all (other than default sharpening). The owl, which had previously been in some sun, flew through some shade. The Mark IV held focus perfectly in spite of the rapidly changing lighting conditions.

[Doug Brown]

And this is the BG I was photographing the owl against.

[Markus Jais]

A powerful image with great eye contact and great wing pose.

Markus

[arash_hazeghi]

This is great and very promising Doug! you can pull up the shady one and still get a good image.

[Doug Brown]

Here's a quick LR processing job on the dark owl. I boosted the Exposure slider to +1.72, pulled the Blacks slider down to 2, bumped Clarity to +17, and Saturation +2. This is one area where the Mark IV does much better than the 7D; recovering areas of underexposure.

[arash_hazeghi]

Here's a quick LR processing job on the dark owl. I boosted the Exposure slider to +1.72, pulled the Blacks slider down to 2, bumped Clarity to +17, and Saturation +2. This is one area where the Mark IV does much better than the 7D; recovering areas of underexposure.

Very nice Doug, I agree this much underexposure with 7D goes to trash, well you paid 3 grand more! . If you get a chance send me the Cr2 file, I will try out a few tricks with DPP and my guess is it will come out even better than this.

[Jay Gould]

Doug, you are making that 1D4 sing!! Can't wait to get mine in May. TFS not just the original - all of the RPs too.

[Colin Knight]

Stunning, Doug! I don't think I could have gotten a reasonably sharp image under those circumstances.

[arash_hazeghi]

Doug gave me permission to post the processed owl shot

The sharpness of this photo is amazing

[arash_hazeghi]

And here is a 100% crop from head area, DPP processing, EV=+1.5, shadows =2 chroma NR=10 all other settings default, the amount of detail is really great.

[Rosl Roessner]

Thank you for all the information and showing the images!
Yor pictures are really outstanding!

[Doug Brown]

Thanks for taking the time to reprocess the image Arash. Nice work!

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Very impressed with the 1d mark IV file. This should open up loads of opportunities that were hard with earlier cameras.

[Haim Ziv]

Fascinating and very impressive work.

[paul leverington]

The detail in the 100% crop is just awesome Doug. Jim i bet is having the time of his life these days! I have found the predictive focus to loose it rather consistently say in such a situation as your shot here and then the subject slows to land on a perch. The predictive doesn't react to this case and focuses out in front, to where the subject would be if it had not slowed. I'm experimenting with not tracking and hitting the shutter only when the subject gets right just about at the point you really want the shot. The decisive moment--which I'll be the first to admit I fail to get nailed a lot more often than I get.

paul

[Doug Brown]

This should open up loads of opportunities that were hard with earlier cameras.

I agree Kaustubh.