Barred Owl coming at you...
There is a family of Barred owls that nest each year in a small local park which is made up of forest and a river. This is one of the parent's who has 2 chicks this year. We locate the parents either by listening to the robins squawking at them or use playback to locate them and bring them into the few open areas over the river.
This shot was with the Sony A9, Sony 100-400GM at 400mm, f/5.6, 1/1600, ISO 5000
In this instance the owl was called towards us with playback...we would limit the playback to just a few passes per evening as not to overwork the owls...however they are hunting the river for crayfish for their young so we got a lot of natural calling and some flight each evening anyways.
My personal nit is that I would have liked more even lighting for the right eye but was happy I got a small catchlight in the eye anyways. I did bring shadow up a little on that eye...do people think I should bring it up more? This was processed solely in LR with the regular sort of stuff and some bright spots in the background were cloned out with LR's Spot tool set to "Heal"
FWIW I am currently evaluating the Sony A9 and comparing it to the AF system in my D500, D850 and 1DX2....IMO the A9 has the best AF system of all the systems now. The D500/D850/D5 took BIF up a notch from even the excellent 1DX2 but this A9 raises the bar even further...it is pretty remarkable what it can do. And no this photo isn't an example of what it can do that others can't because I also have almost the identical shot from the D850 the night before and my friends have the similar shot from the 1DX2 two nights before. But, the amount of consistent shots in a burst like this with head-on owl IF is significantly higher than what a DSLR AF system can do in 2018.
Hope you like it,
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