Raptor Weekend

Saturday was the Photo Wild event at the Carolina Raptor Center.  It's really a fund raiser that helps their efforts to save damaged raptors and return them to the wild whenever possible.  It also has the side benefit of letting a group of photographers get close to the birds.  The images they post hopefully increases public awareness.  Anything that promotes nature and an awareness of the environment is a positive thing so far as I'm concerned.  The $65 it costs is reasonable for the 4 hours of bird shooting time.

This is the first image to post.  I picked this Barred Owl (Strix varia) because it was one of the most difficult to deal with photographically.  This bird is somewhat used to people and well behaved, that was the good news.  The bad news is that his location was in a pool of sunlight that produced really extreme contrast.  The raw files looked like a major case of burned out highlights and clipped blacks.  I knew when shooting the bird it was going to be difficult.  The only thing to do is to make a guess as to what camera settings to use and hope for the best.  For this one I used center weighted metering in Aperture Preferred mode.  f/4.0 gave me 1/400th with my Sigma 70-200.  ISO was 320.  Looking at the preview on back of the camera the image looked a disaster. 

But thanks to the Photo Processing gods for 14-bit raw files.  The burned out highlights turned out to have good detail, and the clipped blacks revealed enough contrast to work with.  It took a couple of layers of "Shadows and Hightlights" adjustments to get an image that looked reasonable.  Where there was extreme contrast I sometimes two layers with small adjustments rather that trying to do everything in a single step.  I'm not completely positive that this works in all cases, but it seems to work often enough on difficult images to keep it in the toolbox.  I didn't really have to do anything with color, it just kind of worked out once the various contrast adjustment were finished.

All in all, worth the extra effort to pull some goodness out of a raw file that was a little ugly.