Burrowing Owl

Plastic · Jan 26, 2009

Took some shots of this small owl this weekend. New to photography and trying to learn how to take wildlife pics. Fully manuel, Nikon D40X, sigma 50-500. Close and sharp is not as easy as some people on here make it look, some day i'll get it. Comments welcome.

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Thanks for looking.

Antarctican · Jan 26, 2009

Ooo, love the first one! What an icy stare. And the last one makes me giggle...looks like it's playing hide and seek or something.

polymoog · Jan 27, 2009

Nice pics, especially for a beginner

EricD · Jan 27, 2009

Very nice job for starters! Not sure if you used auto focus or not but for me if the subject is not moving I use manual focus. Auto focus tends to try and focus on things around your subject (i.e. moving grass or objects etc).
Last thing I would say is always focus on the eyes!

Nice job and keep them coming!

ps - Where was this photo taken at?

sabbath999 · Jan 27, 2009

It looks like plastic was focusing through a fence or caging (hence the odd striations in the out of focus areas), which makes it REALLY tricky to focus.

A tip from an old wildlife shooter... focus on the eyes. If the eyes are in focus, you can get away with a multitude of sins.

There is a lot that can be done in post to help your pictures have a bit more snap, but you have the "Do not edit" so I can't really show you what I mean.

Best wishes and keep shooting.

Plastic · Jan 27, 2009

Thanks for the great comments. These were taken in an open field in West Texas, auto focus, RAW, monopod and some post processing with photoshop elements, which I also don't understand to well. Perhaps resizing and sharpening accounts for the " through the fence" look. It's ok to edit them, I checked that box when I joined not realy knowing what it ment but thinking that saying no was somehow the safest response.

sabbath999 · Jan 27, 2009

Just a thought, to see what you think.

I did the following in Capture NX (I don't use Photoshop unless I absolutely HAVE to), spent a total of 5 minutes 22 seconds on it (simply to gauge how much work it was).

First, after converting it to a TIF so I could limit generational loss, I cropped it to a 3x4 ratio. I darkened the corner and brightened the area right behind the bird, then I painted gaussian blur on the area behind the bird to give it a nice "fast lens" kind of a feel. I then increased the contrast on the bird just a wee, and used unsharp mask on it to give it a bit of pop.

Finally, I reduced the file size to 600 and saved it back to JPEG.

It was just a "quick & dirty" job with a low rez image, with the full size image I could have been much cleaner about it.

What do you think?