Juvie Barn Owl Portrait

A break from the Hummingbirds, though there are a couple of others I'll probably post.

We put up our first Barn Owl box a number of years ago and it was occupied within a couple of weeks. We've had owls almost every year since. We rearranged things a few years ago and one of the boxes faces an elevated platform I built for trying to get birds in the treetops. It's a bit ooo far away to get the field of view entirely within the door and there was a shaft of sunlight on one of the siblings on the right side, so I ended up cropping to this. The light is reflected from the wall on our right and it's sibling on that side, so it created this strong side lighting.

1Div, 500mm f4 ISL + 2.0TC, Jobu gimbal on RRS legs, f8, 1/50, iso 640, +2 stops exposure compensation to brighten up the subject compared to the sunlit outer wall, aperture priority and pattern metering. Noise reduction using Neat Image. An extra round of sharpening to the facial disk using Topaz Detail 3. Taken July 9th at 6:35 am. This was a day or two before this bird fledged.

Comments and criticisms are always welcome.

Thanks for looking,