I'm watching you!

[Overread]

Taken with 7D, Sigma 120-300mm f2.8, Canon 2*TC

f7.1, ISO 3200

Little young owl caught watching me stack the bonfire (it wasn't lit). Sat there for a long while just resting and watching and being owly. Even gave me enough time to head in to get the camera.

High ISO and a pretty big crop of the original frame combined with backlighting make for a less than ideal shot technically, but a cute one non the less. The "halo" around him/her is fluffy feathers!

 

[tirediron]

Cute.

 

[pixmedic]

almost looks like ice-sickles around the bird.
certainly good for ISO 3200. how much NR did you do?

 

[Overread]

Lightroom on default settings for the colour noise, then I messed with Neat Image to deal with rest, although the owl was shadowing itself so there was a fair bit of serious nose there that wasn't really easy or possible to get rid of. If it weren't for the heavy crop I suspect much of the noise would vanish in a print or web-display; cropped like it is though its showing up more so. I could also do a background blast of really strong noise reduction if I wanted, but I didn't feel like breaking out the layermasks.


Note original was 5000pixels, cropped was around 1500 pixels on the longest side, so a lot was thrown away (sadly I couldn't get any closer, heck the closer I got the more trees and "stuff" started to get in the way!)