Barred Owl

Barred Owl (Strix varia)

After tramping around in the woods of the Riverwood Conservancy near Toronto recently, I was startled to look up and see this bird staring down at me. It stayed there while I clicked away trying to find the right camera settings and best view through many branches. It was a very overcast day with some sunlight coming through every once in awhile just to make photography more challenging.

This bird was very cooperative in that it stayed put, but it was a little too relaxed: after a little while it fell asleep and presented a fairly unexciting picture of an owl with closed eyes. Also, it turned out that there was only one location where I could see the whole (almost) unobstructed bird. At that location the bird completely filled the frame with just a very small clearance at top and bottom.

The original image was full frame (16 MP). This image is 17.4 MP since I expanded the canvas. I tried many ways of accomplishing the expansion: using content aware scaling; merging images from other shots; simple expansion using cloning and finally vignetting. I like this result the best. It's a combination of some simple cloning and mostly addition of a dark vignette that amounts to a dark frame around the image. This approach left the owl pixels untouched from the original except for some slight exposure adjustment.

There are plenty of owl pixels here. So, the detail is fun to examine.

All comments very welcome.

1D Mark IV, EF400 mm f/5.6L +1.4xTC: ISO 1000, 1/800s, f/10, 0 EV, NR, exposure adjustment, sharpening.