I'm going squirrely trying to improve these photos (help)?

[skullyspice]

I havent shot squirrels in a while but I used to shoot a lot of them back in my film days. As others have said, shooting wide open to get the fastest shutter speed and nice background blur. But my best advice, bring some peanuts with you! they become surprisingly friendly.

[HeavenHell]

Ok, I wandered back out in the woods this afternoon and took this photo:



I think it's an improvement.  All comments good and bad are welcome.

[SiliconVoid]

Composition is very important in how the overall image looks, sharp or not, and while it is preferred to frame for the end product from the beginning you do have a bit of 'canvass' to work with in the higher mp bodies out there. Do not be afraid to crop into the image, that is one of the benefits of digital photography, but you want to make sure you are capturing the sharpest image you can if that is your objective so you can maintain sharpness in the crops.

For example my normal wildlife lens is in for its yearly service (70-300mm-L) and for the past several days I have been playing with the super cheap 70-300 III kit lens from a friend. Not very sharp at all in comparison, but stopping down the lens to its sharpest (f/8-f/11) and then purposely choosing a ISO setting that starts to every so lightly show grain can give a crispness to the image. That will give you the sharpness you may need to perform some PP composition and frame the subject for the least distracting background/surrounding.

(ISO 640 probably showing a tiny bit too much grain with this lens.. and if the branches in the right side of the frame were not so distracting it would have been better to have the squirrel further to the left of a slightly larger perspective.)

[HeavenHell]

Here's another one from today.  Too bad the twigs are in the way

[SiliconVoid]

Here's another one from today.  Too bad the twigs are in the way

Looks good.. Short of the odd twigs, which you couldn't do anything about, a great shot!

[keithfullermusic]

None of the pictures are bad, I think the squirrel just needs to be doing something more interesting.  The problem with squirrels is that they are so common that shots of them aren't exciting unless they are doing something awesome.

I don't have any cool squirrel shots, but it might be fun to try and get them running and jumping where their feet aren't touching the ground.

Last winter I got some shots of a bald eagle flying through the air, and they were awesome because it was a bald eagle, but if they we of a pigeon they would have been pretty lame.  My point being - the more common the animal, the more interesting the shot has to be in order to actually be interesting.