City Squirrel

As planned Bex and I went for a trip into town today; the weather while we were there was amazing! It was bright sunshine and small clouds spread around the sky. The weather was great for us but more of a challenge to the photography, with the direct sunlight casting harsh shadows over everything that was out of shade. With this challenge in mind we set out with our cameras in hand.

There were a few trees growing in a corner of a small open area in the centre of town; in and around these trees a few squirrels were running and jumping around. Fortunately they were in the shade so the light had been diffused nicely. As the squirrels were moving about so quickly it was quite had to focus on them, so when one of them paused for a few seconds, I quickly focussed in and took the photo. I had preset the camera in shutter priority and selected a shutter speed of 1/500^th of a second, this was adequate to freeze the motion and to remove and camera shake. I framed the photo so the squirrel was in the right hand side of the frame, looking into the left side of the frame.

To edit the photo I had to lower the brightness down as the photo was overexposed, fortunately as I had taken the photo in RAW format this didn’t degrade the image quality. After that I cropped the photo down to remove some distractions, and to focus the attention onto the squirrel. I decreased the colour tone and increased the saturation to make the colours look more vivid and to make the photo as a whole look punchier.

We both enjoyed our trip into town today, both of us took a large amount of photos which should keep the blog running for quite a while! It was good fun trying to take photos of the squirrels as they darted around, I always enjoy the challenge of wildlife photography.

Mat