![\"barn](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/barn-owl-9869b-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIt’s easy to miss the potential of a photo when viewing it full frame.\u00a0 This image makes me wonder how many diamonds in the rough I’ve deleted over the years…<\/p>\n
When I get home from a morning spent in the field I\u00a0face the dreaded task of culling images.\u00a0 On\u00a0productive mornings I may take a thousand\u00a0shots or more and\u00a0there can be a fine line between photos I keep and those I trash.\u00a0\u00a0Those decisions are usually based on a\u00a0cursory look as I quickly run through the\u00a0photos in my photo organizer\u00a0and\u00a0even after all these years I occasionally miss seeing the potential of an image.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a01\/2000, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon XTi, 500 f\/4, ISO 400, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This photo, a Barn Owl in flight at Farmington Bay, is one of my older images (2\/15\/08).\u00a0 \u00a0It was taken with\u00a0my first DSLR camera, the Canon XTi\u00a0(boy did that tiny camera look silly\u00a0attached to my huge\u00a0500mm lens!).\u00a0 The image file size of the XTi\u00a0is 44% smaller than that of my current 7D\u00a0(10.1 versus 17.9 megapixels) so I was reluctant to crop my images significantly for fear of losing too many pixels\u00a0and causing image quality to suffer (a standard I didn’t have the experience to judge very well at the time).\u00a0\u00a0 Back then I had a\u00a0difficult time visualizing what the cropped image\u00a0might look like.<\/p>\n The above version of the photo is full frame (uncropped).\u00a0 My heart sank when I saw the pink blob behind the bird but I immediately knew what it was – a flag put out by refuge personnel to mark stands of Phragmites that needed to be dealt with.\u00a0 My snap judgment at the time\u00a0told me that the blob was too close to the bird to be cropped out\u00a0(I didn’t want to clone it out) and\u00a0that I’d be pushing the limits of image quality\u00a0if I cropped it out anyway.\u00a0\u00a0I was wrong on both counts. \u00a0(I’m actually surprised I\u00a0didn’t\u00a0delete the image).<\/p>\n Until yesterday I hadn’t even looked at this image for\u00a0over six years and I had never opened it for processing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But last night I stumbled across the image again and decided to dink around with it a little.\u00a0 It turns out that I could crop out the pink blob, avoid cloning and still have over 50% of the original image left.\u00a0 I like the wing position, the sense of environment in the setting and\u00a0the wintery colors of the clouded blue sky in the\u00a0far background.\u00a0 I do wish I had light in the\u00a0eye of the owl but with this species I tend to be a little more forgiving of that\u00a0deficiency\u00a0because their eyes are so deeply set.<\/p>\n This experience makes me wonder how many images with potential I’ve deleted in the past seven years.\u00a0 I hope I don’t dwell on it though.\u00a0\u00a0I already have enough issues to keep me awake at night…<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s easy to miss the potential of a photo when viewing it full frame. This image makes me wonder how many diamonds in the rough I’ve deleted over the years…<\/p>\n![\"barn](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/barn-owl-9869a-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n