Scenes from the Backyard

I could have called this shot “Whatever” in reference to the apparent lack of respect the squirrel is paying our two dogs. In fact my wife hand raised this squirrel after it was separated from if mom during Hurricane Ike. During this time the squirrel lost most of its natural fear of our dogs and all of its fear of us. This made it easy to get near the action on this shot.

Tech: Oly E-3, 12-60 Zuiko @ 60mm, f10 @ 1/80 and ISO 200, Stacked Warming Filter [Pops Oranges and Browns] and Circular Polarizer, Aperture Priority Post Processing: Duplicate Background>Curves Adjustment Layer>Merge Visible>Clone out Power Line and Distracting Element in Flower Bed>TA Exposure Correction>TA Simplify>Mask of Simplify Effect from Faces of the Cocker and Squirrel

Another Backyard Squirrel

I wanted to try out the combination of my 50-200 zoom and a new extension tube I had recently purchased, so I broke out the combo in the backyard. I took a series of photographs to test the close focusing ability of this combo and was mostly happy with the results. The combination did produce an extremely narrow depth of field and limited focal range that took some getting use to but once I did things worked out fine.

Tech: f3.5, 1/320, ISO800, 150mm, aperture priority mode Post Processing: High Pass Sharpening, Dup layer in Overlay mode, levels adjustment to brighten mid-tones, vignette.