Young Eagle Owl. During a day in the ZOO of Rotterdam (Blijdorp), I saw this youngster at feeding time. It was quite shy when moving in on the food.

This is the third time that I post this image. The first few times I wasn't really satisfied with it. Like Marc H. pointed out, there was a disturbing dead branch in the foreground and the trunk the bird perches on had large completely washed-out areas. And last, but not least, the chick itself was in the shadow, while the green leafs were in the sunlight. These three things together were very disturbing in the picture and with the last comments of Marc, I decided to spend another few hours trying to improve it, and here's the result.The dead branch I got rid of by filling in the missing parts of the green leafs and living twigs that were behind it. That, though it costed about 4 hours of work, came out just fine. Then I wanted to work on the washed-out areas on the trunk and that was quite a bit more difficult. First I used the rubber stamp tool to fill the white areas in with the very small pattern of detailed wood I had in the picture. To make it look more natural, I used the burn tool to make dark lines in it and the dodge tool to make lighter lines, all this in order to give a feeling of depth to the pattern. Having that done, I played with levels, selective colour, contrast, and (selective) saturation for a long time, to make the owl stand out more and subdue the leafs a bit. All this has cost me three full evenings, but I'm quite happy with it now. I will include a picture of the second posting I did, so a comparison can be made. Questions about all this? Mail me!