Hungry Squirrel
Walk in the park just before sunset, with my new 18-300mm walkabout lens - not really sharp, fast or long enough to catch squirrels, but this guy stayed still j...
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Walk in the park just before sunset, with my new 18-300mm walkabout lens - not really sharp, fast or long enough to catch squirrels, but this guy stayed still just long enough. I got him sharp at the eyes, which was as good as I could ever hope.
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Oct, 2017Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
Taken in my local park in North London. This was just an opportunistic grab. There are a lot of squirrels in the park; they're fairly used to people but they won't often let you get closer than about 10-15 ft, which is really at the limit for a 300mm lens on such a small, quick subject. This guy saw me; I got a bit too close so he ran up the far side of the tree - then poked his head around for another look once he felt safer. I was just lucky that the camera was about ready for the lighting levels and auto-focus was fast enough. He was gone in two seconds. I got one shot.Time
It was taken mid afternoon on a sunny day in Autumn. He's actually back-lit, North-facing. The sun is behind and left. I did have to rescue a lot of the shadows in post to give it the full 'sunny day' look without him being too dark and shaded.Lighting
Honestly, the lighting shouldn't have worked. He's shaded and back-lit at the same time. The bit of tree you see in front of him was in sunlight, he was in shade. My camera on Aperture Preferred exposed for the sunny foliage behind, but the RAW had enough information to be able to level it out afterwards, without getting into that HDR look, which I'm not a fan of.Equipment
Nikon D5500, Nikkor DX 18-300mm f/3.5-6.3 @300mm ISO 800 1/250s f/6.3 This is my 'guilty pleasure' walkabout lens. It's not the sharpest tool in the box, but it lets me grab a huge range of image options without carrying a back-pack of lenses. At 300mm it's got more than enough blur in the out of focus areas and the bokeh really isn't at all bad. The AF is surprisingly fast even at the long end so long as there's a reasonable amount of light. For capturing this type of quick wildlife shot I keep the lens short until the camera's up to my face, so I can frame and zoom at the same time. I find it saves me maybe a second, finding through the viewfinder what my eye saw before I lifted the camera.Inspiration
Have camera, will travel. I was just out for a walk in the park, camera with me in case I saw anything interesting. I managed to get two keepers that day, "Hungry Squirrel" and "Sunset over the Serengeti... or a football pitch in North London" also on ViewBug https://www.viewbug.com/photo/75667503 The light that day was like golden hour gone mad - it later turned out to be a huge dust storm blown over from the Sahara. The colours it gave were just so fabulously warm.Editing
I had to pull up the shadows quite a long way. It wasn't right down into the blacks but the little guy himself was really under-exposed compared to the sunlit areas. I didn't HDR it (I find that look quite distracting), just used Nikon's own ViewNX-i on the original RAW files which is great for curves and definitely best for keeping the colours you intended, and then Photoshop for some selective sharpening [I use a couple of gentle high-pass filters and manually mask out the areas I don't want to be sharpened]. The shallow DoF in the lens at 300mm meant his chest wasn't quite as sharp as at the eyes, so it all needed a bit of TLC. Finally I cropped what was a landscape into a portrait, taking about the middle 'half' to better emphasise the subject. [Note for editor - I can dig out the original if you want to see the comparison, before/after, as a 'what to do in post' example.]In my camera bag
Walkabout, that's my rig: D5500, 18-300mm lens. No strap, camera is in my hand ready to go. Lens cap *off* ;) For anything else I've an assortment - Nikon 35mm 1.8, Nikon 50mm 1.4 [which is gorgeous] Tamron 70-300 [which I mainly use for macro] and an odd Russian-modded 1980's Helios 44M 52mm 2.0, with intentional internal purple flaring and 'fake' anamorphic bokeh. Studio, I have a couple of LED video panels, which are great for macro [as you can see to focus], extension tubes, a focus rail and three Godox strobes with wifi remote.Feedback
The only way to capture this type of image is have a long enough, fast enough lens and always have it ready to go. Take the camera with you, be prepared. This is not the same as sitting for weeks in a Land Rover to snap a lion catching a wildebeest, but it is the local park equivalent available to almost all of us;)
