Squirrel!

I was walking down the road in Harpers Ferry when I saw this little guy. Squirrels don’t like to stay still for long and they don’t like you getting to close so I was at the maximum end of my telephoto lens for this one (200mm on a Micro Fourth Thirds camera so 400mm adjusting for crop). A combination of it being the far end of the zoom and being a very overcast day left my shutter speed much lower than I would have liked and I didn’t quite nail the focus.

So to compensate/hide this I scaled the photo down. It might not work in print but on a website I think I almost get away with it. Yes there’s a bit more grain than I’d like and not as much sharpness as I’d like but if you’re taking handheld shot from maximum range of a moving target and in poor lighting conditions you have to be willing to compromise a little I think.

In this case I’ll take the character of the image over perfect technical quality. I did do a little work on it in Lightroom though, mostly trying to tweak the sharpness a bit and to focus the eye more n the squirrel and less on other distracting elements. The major change I made was to go for a square crop. This helped to significantly increase the focus on the squirrel and to remove extraneous elements. Once again I’m using the rule of thirds, this time by having the squirrel’s eye right on the intersection of the bottom and left lines of the rule.