Great Gray Owl

[Mike Osborne]

I made the trip to Kingsville Ontario like many others did and found the Great Gray Owl on the last day it was spotted. As it was perched on a hydro wire it occurred to me to stay back and wait for a flight shot instead of trying for a close-up of it on an undesirable perch. I'm curious what the consensus is on bird photos where the subject is on a plain sky background, like or dislike.

I don't usually do much post processing as my photoshop skills are lacking. I use mostly Canon DPP for image enhancement, in this case a little saturation and one round of sharpening. In Photoshop I cropped it by about 30 percent and then sized for posting.

Canon 7d, 500mm f4, handheld, ISO400, 1/1600, f5.6

Cheers
Mike

[Robert Holguin]

Wonderful shot. Love the flight pose, great head angle, excellent detail, and I personally dont mind the plain sky.
Well done.

[gail bisson]

Nice flight shot and good head turn. I am OK with a plain sky but do prefer a bit of cloud or different colors in sky as a BG,
Gail
I might selectively sharpen the head a bit

[Jeroen Stel]

Wonderful pose and agree with Gail about the extra sharpening on the head area.

Greetings,

Jeroen Stel

[Marina Scarr]

Mike, you have a great capture here to work with. Unfortunately, post processing is about 50% of the process. I wish it weren't true. I have taken the liberty of working on your picture. I did some shadow/highlight work, cropped a little tighter, overall sharpened and then resharpened the head just a tad. What do you think? Now that I am looking at it again, it's possible that I oversharpened the face.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Mike, you had a very good base image and Marina has done a very good job on it.

I said this in another post also...if you get a good top-side view, I dont mind the sky BG. you got lots of details here. well done.