Ground Squirrel Checking His Surrounding

[Loi Nguyen]

I don't suppose people often post images of ground squirrel in this Forum. I was actually out taking pictures of hawks. These Ground Squirrels live in Red Tailed Hawk Territory, so only the cautious ones survive to tell the tale. This one might be one of them!

1DX
500f4 II + 1.4X III
1/2500
F5.6
ISO-800
Handheld
Manual Mode

Cropped for composition.

Appreciate your comments.

thank you!

Loi

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Hope he made it thru another day :). I really like the great detail on the squirrel and how he also blends so well with his environment. Sweet pose too.

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Loi, if you have it, then I think you could afford to move the whole crop down more and the subject may need a little CW rotation, although I do appreciate he is leaning forward. I'm viewing on the laptop so not ideal, but the image does look crunchy/contrasty? It should be a much more 'cleaner', did you add Black, Contrast or Clarity to the image? I've been shooting with the same kit with much higher ISO and the IQ does look good, so I'm not sure what areas you need to improve on regarding the final output? BKG works well and separates the subject. If it was me I would have shot both landscape & portrait, going portrait is another option here if you have more below?

TFS
Steve

[Loi Nguyen]

Hi Loi, if you have it, then I think you could afford to move the whole crop down more and the subject may need a little CW rotation, although I do appreciate he is leaning forward. I'm viewing on the laptop so not ideal, but the image does look crunchy/contrasty? It should be a much more 'cleaner', did you add Black, Contrast or Clarity to the image? I've been shooting with the same kit with much higher ISO and the IQ does look good, so I'm not sure what areas you need to improve on regarding the final output? BKG works well and separates the subject. If it was me I would have shot both landscape & portrait, going portrait is another option here if you have more below?


TFS
Steve

Hi Steve, this image was pretty much taken out of the box. It was shot at 5PM here in Southern California and the sun was still high and intense, about 3 hours before sunset, thus the contrasty look. I added a bit of room to the top and reduced contrast a little bit using Curces in CS6 here. He was leaning forward, so I don't think the image needs rotation judging from the way the grass grow.

Thank you for giving me feedback.

Loi

[Steve Kaluski]

Hi Loi, it looks better, but I would tweak the Levels something like 5, 1.00, 230, so if this is almost straight out of the box then I think you need to look at balancing the exposure a bit more. I still think he's leaning fwd to much, but hey, no deal breaker.

[Morkel Erasmus]

Hi Loi. Nice low angle and alert pose.
Repost is a lot better, I'd still like to see a tad more at the bottom?

[Steve Canuel]

Nothing wrong with seeing the little guys on the forum Loi. I like the pose and how he stands out from the surroundings.

[Loi Nguyen]

Hi Loi. Nice low angle and alert pose.
Repost is a lot better, I'd still like to see a tad more at the bottom?

Hi Morkel, I ran out of canvas trying to rotate the image a little bit :(

[Anette Mossbacher]

Hi Loi,

love those little guys, please do post more of them :))
The RP looks great to me as well. You took off a bit of the bottom in your RP, maybe a bit more bottom would look better! Just my thought on it :))

Have a great day

Ciao
Anette

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Loi - Squirrels make good subjects and are accessible. Good comments and suggestions above.

TFS,
Rachel