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Great Horned Owl

Discussion

5 replies
Posted by Craig Strand on May 14, 2008 at 1:10 AM
Great Horned Owl
Dispite the cloudy skies and light rain, I decided to visit the Ridgefield NWR this morning. I'm glad as it turned out to be a great day for sightings, including this Great Gray. I am still perfecting my usage of a new camera and under the poor lighting conditions, attempted to make the best of a well positioned but distant subject. I set the wt. balance to cloudy, and under AV priority at 5.6 and ISO at 800. This was a manual focus as I used a 2X on the long lens.
In PS applied neat image, exposure increase .5 stop, burned the white chest feathers and some eye highlights. Fill layer for light sky area.

Canon 40D, 600mm +2X F/9 1/160 ISO 800 full frame

Does this work for you?
Thanks for comments/suggestion
Posted by Ned Fenimore on May 14, 2008 at 1:15 AM
Pretty good detail and I like how you fill the frame with this guy...
Posted by David Cobb on May 14, 2008 at 9:34 AM
Nice full-frame image Craig. The background hurts the image, but it's not like we can choose where these owls land! I need to make it out to Ridgefield NWR soon. Thanks for posting.

David M. Cobb
Posted by Catherine Reilly on May 14, 2008 at 12:08 PM
So exciting to see this wild bird in such a great close-up. Way to go, Craig! Amazing shot. :toast:
Posted by Rick Lamb on May 14, 2008 at 5:46 PM
Owls are amazingly approachable. This is fine example of just that. My only nit would be to sharpen it up a bit more - it's a tad too soft IMHO.

Craig I think you will find that the auto white balance (AWB) on the Canon 40D does a stunningly great job of nailing the white balance. Still capable of missing it but most times it hits it right on. I rarely change it... And remember to ALWAYS shoot RAW for the best results.
Posted by Craig Strand on May 14, 2008 at 8:05 PM
Thanks for the suggestions and critique Rick. This was shot in jpeg as my photoshop CS2 does not recognize the raw format for the 40D. I have ordered the upgrade to CS3 but haven't received it yet. I will try to sharpen more but the image was manually focused as the auto focus does not work with a 2X on the 600mm lens. I think my eye might be slightly off on the manual focus. Thanks again.