The most Beautiful chicks.

[dankearl]

I stumbled on these two yesterday. Bad Light, Bad habitat, a gray day here, but I don't get this kind of shot very often, so posted it anyway.
Great Horned owlets, the most beautiful chicks in the bird world in my opinion.

1/200
f7.1
390mm
iso640

[Geoff Warnock]

Lovely chicks - I agree about the clutter and lack of light, but I would certainly have taken the shot too. You might be able to bring out more sharpness in the chicks.

[John Chardine]

Hi Dan (Assume that's your name; we use real names here and you can send a PM to James Shadle to change it).

The image has a lot of potential. I don't mind the clutter of the BG here. It is the habitat of the owls, no elements run across the subject, and the clutter is fairly even. There are things you can do to the image to reduce the impact of the BG. I would brighten up the subjects with some dodging or other technique. The face and the eyes of the left bird needs this especially. Second I would go tighter on the crop and move the birds over to the left, thereby giving more room to the right where the righthand bird is looking. The screenshot below gives you an idea of what I'm thinking about. Finally, I agree with Geoff that another round of sharpening would help. Give all this a try Dan and wee look forward to a repost.

One final point. I seek out grey days and shun bright sun. Cloudy days provide lower contrast, even light which works very well for nature portraits of all kinds. The light comes from the sky rather than a point source (the sun) and so the shadows are nicely filled by light coming from all directions. The trade off (there's always a tradeoff) is that you have less light to work with and have to use a combination of higher ISOs and longer shutter speeds, but IMO this cost is minimal compared to the light you will enjoy.

[Jeff Cashdollar]

John hit the major issues and yes - always take the shot!

The eyes are always a key part of any image hence, lighten a tad, play with crops and sharpen. That would be a great start to strengthening this cool moment in nature picture.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hello, John has covered the tech aspects so I won't dwell on those except to say that if your camera has a pop-up flash this would have been the time to use it. I certainly wouldn't call this bad light, just soft, diffuse, and wonderful light. I would have cranked the ISO to get more light into the image. So many people think that overcast skies are bad, but the fact is that the sunny day is the worst time to shoot. If you ever get an opportunity like this again, turn up the ISO and turn on that flash. It would have made a big difference in your image!

All that said, this is a very nice capture with lots of potential as John said and I just love these chicks!

[dankearl]

Thanks for the responses.
I think I actually did a lot of what you all recommended.
I did highlight and saturate the chicks from the background as much as I could.
It is also as large a crop as I could get away with, so additional sharpening would not help.
I was probably 150 feet away so no flash would help.
I just need a bigger lens (see my post in the photography equipment thread).
I still think it was worth posting, not an everyday sighting and I don't know that it could be made any better but thanks for the input, I always learn something.
Here is the unprocessed original.
By bad light, I mean dark!
1/200 with iso640.
I don't like to go above 800 even though the Nikon folks claim the D7000 will do wonders at high iso's.
Not with a big crop like this.
I think 640 is pretty much the maximum for this.

[Kerry Perkins]

Dude, you have no faith! You can definitely use higher ISO settings, you just have to learn how to deal with the noise in post processing. Get outside of your comfort zone once in a while, that is where you will learn the most. A good flash unit with a Better Beamer would absolutely have helped here. Sharpening definitely helped and I coaxed some more color and detail out of this low-res jpeg, so the RAW file would have yielded even more of both assuming you shoot RAW. I even had to post at the smaller size since I keep my images on BPN.

[dankearl]

Thanks, Kerry!
I'll try to have more "faith".
I also hope to get a bigger lens!
Your repost is nice.

[Kerry Perkins]

LOL! I'm still holding onto my faith for a 500!

[gail bisson]

Love this thread. Lots of good info. The repost is great
Gail

[John Chardine]

For sure worth posting Dan. This is how the learning process works. Good repost by Kerry. I still think the image has a lot of potential.