About the Image(s)

This month’s image was taken in my backyard. I had been hearing this guy for months only ever catching a silhouette of him in the early hours of morning. On this day there was a commotion in the trees that caused me to look at what was going on. There sat Mr. Owl. Nearby was a mocking bird taunting him. Knowing I had my 100-400mm lens on my camera, I ran into the house to get it hoping that he’d still be sitting there when I came back out. Sure enough! I shot this at 400mm, ISO 2800, f/5.6, at 1/1000sec. Because he was so close to the trees, I couldn’t blur the background with the aperture. In post, I first tried using the mixer brush in PS to give the background a painterly look, but I just wasn’t happy with it. To me, it looked un-natural. Then using a few different layers in PS, I first put the owl on a layer by himself. Next, I used the gaussian blur on a second layer as the original until I got the leaves a bit softer. To darken the background, I added a Brightness and Contrast layer to the blurred layer then put the owl layer on top. What do you think? Isn’t he a handsome fellow?