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Squirrel

Photography

Processing

With winter being quite void of colour, I decided to do some heavier processing to make the squirrels stand out against the background. The two examples below show "Before & After" an edit. The first image being an unprocessed RAW image (iso 1600) and the second one being first run through DxO PureRAW 3 to reduce the noise. I then did the following edits:

 

  • Cloned out distracting details

  • Darkened the log

  • Darkened background

  • Desaturated background

  • Added contrast and vignette

  • Applied colour grade

Using different amounts of saturation and contrast on the subject will require a reasonably accurate mask, which can be tricky with hair and fur. Some software can help to automate this process, but nothing is perfect and this is probably the most fiddly part of the workflow. This amount of rework is not something I usually do, as I usually like to keep things as faithful as possible. Whether this works for you will come down to personal preference, and I'm not totally convinced myself, but it is a fun example of what is possible.

 

This next image is processed similarly to the one above, but with more extreme contrast and no colour grade. There's another reason why it's interesting to mention here, and that's the field of view.

Wide Angle​​​​

I usually photograph squirrels with an 85mm or 135mm lens (above), but since I can get very close to them, I decided to try a much wider angle. In the case of the next image, I used a 24mm (similar field of view you'd get on a standard phone lens). Although this has far more perspective distortion, it allows me to capture more background for context. Being a full frame f/1.4 lens, I am still able to blur that out quite a lot to help isolate the subject when I need to. Since the camera is only a few centimetres from the squirrel here, it helps to be able to shoot silently. If your camera doesn't have this feature, the squirrels will get used to it if you build them up to it slowly.

Infrared

Since I have an infrared camera, it seemed rude not to at least try photographing them in that wavelength. There is unfortunately not a huge difference to squirrels in infrared light, but one thing is their eyes. It's usually difficult to see the pupil in squirrel's eyes because they look all black in most lighting. When they do show up in infrared, they are considerably more clear.

Thermal

When I got my hands on a basic thermal camera for my phone, I tried it out on squirrels and immediately found something interesting. This squirrel had a damaged paw and the video shows that with high levels of heat. 

Vintage Cameras

My main camera is the Sony A1, and you would assume that everything about it is cutting edge, especially the colours. However, since collecting and using some older digital cameras, I noticed that ones with CCD sensors were producing way more punchy colours with squirrels against foliage. The complimentary red against green is a great look, but it was often getting washed out to a brown mess, and it wasn't something that you could just push the saturation slider to fix. With CCD cameras, I was getting a much more punchy result, and it was seemingly not related to the processing, lens or even camera. To see more samples and thoughts about images from this old DSLR sensor technology, see my dedicated page here.

Apex

Despite the above CCD topic, the Sony A1 combined with the Sony 135GM lens is a formidable combination for photographing almost anything. It doesn't do anything magical like a smartphone. If you screw up you'll get bad photos. But if you know what you want, and you need performance to get there, it simply delivers. Sure, it's about ten times the cost of the previous combination (or 100 times just the camera), but it really can be that much better. 

Lightweight & Budget

As cheap and geeky as it can be to use older DSLRs for up close squirrel photography, it's certainly not an easy or pleasant experience. My mission here was to find a cheap and light system that was also powerful and highly capable. Up until very recently, this combination of features would have been hard to find. For less than €800 and 800g, the camera and lens combination that took the below photo feels a bit like a miracle.

The75mm f/.2 AF APS-C Sirui lens is only €380 brand new! That gets you a 113mm f/1.8 full frame equivalent, which is a really good sweet spot for this kind of photography, and its 69cm close focus also means you can get just the squirrel's face and hands in frame if you want to. Combining its decent AF speed with the Sony ZV-E10's animal eye-AF, silent shutter and decent burst speed makes it feel like a mini Sony A9 + Samyang AF 135mm f/1.8, while costing and weighing half as much. That's just insane! Although you lose in-body image stabilization, and an optical viewfinder (which I don't really need for this photography anyway), you do gain a fully articulated rear screen, meaning that low angle portrait shots are now possible too.

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