Here we have en extreme light situation with this dramatic image of a Snowy Owl hitting the mark. This simply shows that an otherwise bad light situation can be saved with post-processing instead of finding its way to the trash bin.

The sun was practically below the horizon which created a poor light situation.

Canon 7D with the 500L f4 lens handheld @ 1/1000, f4, ISO 640, +2 2/3 exposure compensation.

Very slight crop to level the horizon straight. I was lucky that the bird was white against a darker background. This permitted the sensor to squeeze a lot more image info on the white bird due to the extra over-exposture caused by the darker background - in normal daytime light, the white of the bird would have been blown out.

After sharpening, I used the despeckling filter to reduce noise, but it wasn't enough. I had trouble with a noticable halo effect around the fence post. My good friend Dom Cantin re-worked my sharpening technique with a much better result.

Cheers,

Mike