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Osprey

Irvine Regional Park
Orange, California, USA
Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

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I had never seen these before. They almost don't look real.

Irvine Regional Park
Orange, California, USA
Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

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And thanks for the stories!

Nice! I remember dodging mud daubers with our bare feet as kids.

Yeah, unfortunately white balance is kind of a one-dimensional concept, assumes everything is on a blue-yellow spectrum, and I kinda rushed through processing those images. I had to play with the other dimension, the green-magenta tint, to get rid of the green color cast actually created by the leaves, without imposing a pink cast. The three tools I use all have different ways of scaling those sliders. All quite subjective and fussy. Here are new versions processed in Adobe Camera Raw. The white feathers now look a lot more white, and the tree bark more gray the way it should be.

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Barn owl
Irvine Regional Park
Orange, California, USA

Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

Because of the sunlight coming through the green leaves, I found that for JPG white balance the Fluorescent setting was best. I applied a similar setting plus other tweaks to the RAW file. The overall impression is still kind of pink, but when I look at individual parts of the image they look accurate.

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#9 is awesome.

This was handheld and manual focused, using Focus Peaking. The exif tells me the focus distance was 207' 7", and with focal length 281mm and F14 the calculator tells me the DoF should be 73'. The cores of the flowers in front of and behind the bird look about the same, so I think that confirms the DoF. The pupil is fairly defined and I can see ridges on the bill, so maybe we're just seeing the limits of this non-pro lens.

I forgot to mention this was about a 26% crop... that doesn't help. Sometimes I use Adobe's Super Resolution before cropping, which helps a lot, but this time I didn't.

As for the white... the histogram does tail off well before clipping. It was an overcast day, as we can see in the full pic where the plants are not casting shadows. There's *some* definition in the feathers, but not so much on the back. On days with direct sun I seem to get better definition. Still, it was over 200' away...

Thanks for the comments! I'm learning all the time. This lens is far better than the 40-150 I'd been using up until a couple months ago.

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Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II @ 281mm
Santa Ana River, Orange, California, USA

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It landed in a tree near me and stayed just long enough for a few pictures.

Santa Ana River Trail
Orange, California, USA

Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II
281mm, f/7.1

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I once had a lithium battery pack explode when I was charging it with a generic charger. Fortunately i was home and it did not catch anything else on fire. Now I always use a charger that is designed to go with the particular battery pack. When I charge my drone batteries I put them in supposedly fireproof pouches closed by big Velcro, in a box also closed by Velcro, in an area of my garage unlikely to catch anything on fire.

👍🏻👍🏻

👍🏻👍🏻

Fifteen ibises at sunset.
Santa Ana river, Orange, California USA
Olympus E-M5 II, M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm F4.8-6.7 II

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