Windblown Snowy Owl

[dankearl]

I made the pilgrimage to the Washington coast this weekend.
Epic adventure!
30-40 mph winds and rain on the sand spit.
The Owls were fantastic!
Handholding a camera in the wind was a lot of fun!
The best photos i have ever taken. This is sort of unusual I hope, A Snowy in a gale!
1/1000
f5.6
ISO 250
420mm (300f2.8 w/ 1.4x)
Nikon D7000
Handheld.

DSC_8237nx.jpg (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=109032&stc=1&d=1329701973)

[arash_hazeghi]

very cool pose and I like the facial feathers. it's a tad dark and has a blue cast in the whites on my screen. well done!

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

I am getting a little jealous of all thesee snowies. Nice perch and windblown look. Of coure I wish for just a little bit more of that other eye but you did well with this

[dankearl]

Arash, thanks for your comments.
You are correct, it is nice to have another eye look at these.
I did hardly any PP at all to this, so the WB in camera gave the caste which I did not notice.
Your eye is superb.
Thanks and here is a repost.

DSC_8237nx2.jpg (http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=109033&stc=1&d=1329705961)

[Sidharth Kodikal]

Terrific pose and setting, Dan. I like this image a lot and I'm especially enjoying the single claw that sticks out :)
Repost is superb.
Looking forward to more from your excursion.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Dan, it sounds like you were quite excited to capture this - I would have been. The wind blown feathers show up nicely, and just love their yellow eyes. In your repost, it looks like you have desaturated the blues on the whole image. I would have just removed the cast on the snowy.:w3

[Don Nelson]

Dan
Nice image on blustery day.
The repost still has blue and cyan, as measured by the sampling droppers.
I've taken the liberty of a repost -- masking the bird, then removing the blue and cyan, followed by adding a 13/60 contrast mask.
Hope you like it -- you've got a good image. You can follow a similar plan to remove the cast on your raw file image (better than the small jpeg)
Good job!
109047

[arash_hazeghi]

Don's repost nails the color balance

great work for sure

[Don Nelson]

By the way, for those that want to check colors on the screen without pulling it into photoshop, there is a nice free app available at
iconico.com --> look for colorpic. Its a free download.
I don't have any ties to the company -- just a satisfied user of the sampling software (its designed to match up with available color chips, but does a nice job giving R-G-B values -- when the white/gray/black is neutral, all the numbers will be the same (or within a point or two in some cases)

Don

[Ofer Levy]

I like the mood in here! I also like Don's repost!

[gail bisson]

Really nice. I like the windblown feathers and Don's repost is great,
Gail

[Joe Senzatimore]

The re-posts are an improvement over an already fine image. great pose and mood created. Different look at a snowy , and it works very well.

[dankearl]

Don, thanks for taking the time and I like your repost.
I will look into the app you mentioned.
I have 400 images and the blue caste seems to be there on a lot of them, now that I have had it mentioned.
I use auto WB which works most of the time for me but it was overcast but not really low light as
you can see from the techs.
I shot this with iso250 and still could get 1/1000 with the lens stopped down one stop.
I don't understand where the caste comes from.

[Don Nelson]

Dan,

Nice job on this one -- I'd suggest taking the time to process them to get rid of that blue cast before posting new ones.

The blue cast often happens in whites of Snowy Owl images. The sky is a big, blue softbox if the sun is partially obscured, and even if cloudy. Auto WB does not always fix this. I have many images of SNOW with such cast in the RAW, even with auto WB on.

You don't want to desaturate the sky...you should not desaturate the entire image. So you'll be learning some masking if you don't already know.

You'll have to do some masking at a large size image before sizing down for the web -- pixel boundary is critical. You'll see some strange edge effects otherwise - white if you don't get all the sky out of the mask. I think there is a hint of this on the left side of the neck - an effect of a quick and dirty mask of your bird at small image size. People can confuse this sloppy masking with sharpening effects (for desaturation) or for lens chromatic abberation if you've increased saturation for reds, or greens.

You'll also want to desaturate whiter portions of the perch. Again, masking. The bright spot below the bird is particularly blue.

If you don't have it already, Artie's Basic Digital image processing is a pretty good starting place - I'd recommend it. https://store.birdsasart.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=252
And you'll learn how to improve the eye(and the bit of the other eye) on this bird.

[Robert Holguin]

Excellent shot. I really like the feathers been blown by the wind, great perch, and comp.
Don's repost really makes the owl pop.
Well done.