Owlet

Another photo from my recent visit to the Harpers Ferry Highland Games. They had a group there showing various birds of prey including owls and also including this baby owl, or owlet. Who looks incredibly cute, because you can’t see the dead mouse they were hanging onto with their talons.

Of course there were lots of people wanting to look at the birds, so I used my telephoto lens for this again, although at it’s shortest focal length, 200mm in full frame equivalent terms, which let me get really close but still with a low enough f-stop to get some blurring of the background. I wasn’t completely successful here as there is some blurring in the body of the bird, although I did get the eye and face nice and sharp. That’s a bit disappointing really since the bird wasn’t moving much at all, but in my defense I was moving trying to shoot around a lot of people.

My Photoshop editing here was fairly basic. I adjusted the image for noise and sharpness, and tweaked both the black level and the white level to increase contrast. I also dimmed the background a notch to keep the eyes focused on the owlet itself.