Story of the Image
Burrowing Owls are widely distributed species found across the Americas. While places like Florida and Arizona have some well-established sites to find them, I chose to photograph them in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands. They are not the most easily seen birds as they are small and camouflage easily on open grounds due to the their small size and color.
Gear/Preparing the Scene
To photograph this bird, I visited an area called Campo Grande in Southern Pantanal. Due to bad road conditions, the only way to access the burrowing locations by a 4×4 vehicle. We had to get off at multiple locations to look for the birds. At many instances they would escape without any photos. This is when I realized that I had to shoot handheld from the vehicle. I was shooting with my Canon 1dx II and 600 mm lens
Composing the Shot
Once we spotted where the birds were, we got many pictures of them on the ground looking at us rather curiously.
However, the image I had in mind was a flight shot with the bird flying into my camera frame. The only way to get it was to wait for that to happen.
I setup the camera on the ground under a tree and waited for the bird to fly towards me and after a short wait it happened.
Perfecting in Post-Processing
Initial camera raw edits:
Step 1:
I left the White Balance and Exposure untouched. The photo was taken in really strong lighting conditions. Parts of the image were overexposed so. I fixed this by bringing the highlights down.
I also added more Vibrance to strengthen the yellows.
The next step was to crop the image. As seen below, the image was not photographed to get the most ideal crop.
I used the Spot Healing tool to fill some of the gaps.
As seen in the above image the spot healing tool does not always do the perfect job. As an editor it is my responsibility to fix it. To do that, I select the bird, inverse my selection and run a green brush tool at 25% opacity over the area that needs to be fixed .
As you can see, our image is almost ready. I still wanted to added more depth to the eyes to get a piercing look. I selected the eyes and boosted their saturation and contrast.
Next up is one of my most favorite settings—, Color Balance. The aim was to get the image to the most realistic colors as possible. To achieve that i added more blues in the overall image and dropped yellows in highlights.
This really brought everything together and I was close to the dream image I wanted of this bird.
Our image is now ready to be resized and saved. As a rule of thumb, I always resize a vertical image with 1800 pixels on the longer side and this image was not an exception.
Once resized, I then use smart sharpen to sharpen my image.
Now it’s time to save it in the right profile.
For web prints, I use sRGB. For physical prints, I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a JPEG at the highest resolution
Final Image:
About the Bird
The Burrowing Owl is a ground dwelling bird characterized by long legs, brown body speckled with white spots and lack of ear tufts. They live in burrows dug by other animals like Prairie dogs in open spaces without trees. They hunt during both day and night but are active during dawn and dusk. Apart from Amazon rainforest, they breed in the Midwest up to earn Pacific states and Canada in summer. In the winters they breed at Central America and Mexico and can be found around the year in Florida, Mexico and parts of South America. They have insects mostly during the day and consume mammals at night.
