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Mike Hitchen
12-12-2016, 12:17 PM
Walking the circuit round Stanley park in Vancouver, we saw the racoon come out of nowhere and start digging up clams on the beach, deftly opening them and washing them in the water before eating them.

Canon 7d2, 70-200 f4LIS with 1.4xtc, ISO 500 f9 SS about 1/400

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Jonathan Ashton
12-15-2016, 02:48 PM
Hi Mike not sure where they were previously but wondered if story sequences may have been the ideal forum. Interesting from a behavioral point of view, the central image shows the raccoon quite nicely but image 1 and 3 unfortunately the light angle is really helping too much. Perhaps if you lifted the shadows or increased exposure selectively it would help. As a sequence I think it is quite good but individually images 1 and 3 are not optimal in terms of pose/position or light.

Mike Hitchen
12-16-2016, 03:47 AM
Thank you, Jonathan. It was certainly tricky because as you can tell from the shadow I was shooting towards the sun but I will see what I can do with the shadows on 1 and 3

Gabriela Plesea
12-25-2016, 04:45 PM
Dear Mike,

I would like to begin by wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy 2017. Over the past few years I have been a very active member on BPN and was very excited some time ago when asked to moderate this Forum. Sadly, the loss of my life and business partner Andre in July this year changed my life to such an extent that I have been unable to fulfil my duties here. So I apologise profusely for this late comment, and I just want to tell you I am so glad to see you participate. Your sequence just made me realise how much I have missed my BPN home.

I have never seen a racoon in real life and I find this little chap to be really cute. I do understand the difficulties you encountered in capturing those images, given the lighting conditions. Nevertheless, you have managed to put together a lovely behavioural sequence and I am quite certain you can extract more from those images with some careful PP work. Perhaps F9 was a bit too much - do you think it was necessary? I personally would have been happy with F6.3 and more shutter speed:)

Regarding behaviour, I keep wondering how the Racoon manages to get to the flesh in the clam, does he actually smash the clam shell onto a rock? And does wash all that sand off, in the water?

Hope to see more from you, and it would be great to see more racoon images please! I will be back soon with a sequence of my own and looking forward to your critique:w3

Kind regards,