Shakespeareby
VitaminBComment: Greetings from the Critique Club
This is my first CC comment, since I joined today after seeing a forum thread about it. I'm glad I got this one since you didn't get many comments yet. Hopefully it will be helpful to you.
The centered composition works here, though portrait mode may have worked better than landscape mode, especially if you could have gotten all of her in the shot. You got a very sharp image of the owl without having the appearance of over-sharpening. The fine hairs coming off the side emphasize the sharpness of the shot. She really stands out against the lovely soft green background. Your f2.8 really helped out here to make the bird the only subject of the picture. The coloring and white balance are excellent. I like how the shading in the background foliage (if not dodge and burn) gives a mild vignette effect.
You mentioned she is blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, but in the picture I see hardly anything at all in the eye sockets. I'm assuming she still does have both eyeballs. Changing the lighting may have been difficult given the circumstances, but perhaps in postprocessing you could have selected the eyes and worked with them to bring out some of the faint detail, even if it's evidence of her blindness. This is an instance of when bracketing exposure and merging different shots may have also helped you.
The face of the owl appears very flat, though not knowing a Bard Owl it may be that flat. I'm wondering if you could have brought out some more depth by carefully doing selections and brightness/contrast adjustments on parts of the face, or with careful blending of the bracketed exposure mentioned above. Maybe some slight selective lightening of the dark under-feathers would have helped also.
Thank you for the brief history of Tommy. This is a very nice shot that ended up in the middle of the scoring range. I think with some minor changes you could have increased the score by a full point or more.
[ETA] I just looked at this on a different computer and monitor and it looks much different here. On the plus side I see much more definition in the eyes, better facial contours and I think the underbelly is a little lighter. On the minus side the lovely green background I saw before has much more of a yellow tint and I don't see as much definition in the feathers. I guess that goes to show how images can look very different depending on equipment. Now I have to figure out which is more accurate.
Message edited by author 2009-06-09 23:44:20. 
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