Adorable red tree-rats

On thursday morning I met up with new POTNer Steward at Formby Point (North-west England) to shoot some red squirrels and (hopefully) a fox. The light was pretty dull and overcast, so I was struggling to maintain sufficient shutter speed to avoid motion blur. Two of these shots were taken at 800 ISO with the remaining six shots needing 1600 ISO so image quality has suffered slightly I'm afraid, although I am pleased with the results bearing that in mind.

It was great to meet another fellow POTNer and it was a very enjoyable shoot, despite the conditions.

Anyway, here are some of the squirrels, please feel free to leave frank C&C I never object to constructive criticism and I always appreciate any feedback on my work.

1:

Lovely shots. Nos 3, 5 & 7 are my favs. Looks like you had a good time despite the conditions.

Nice shots... It is weird because we were standing next to each other these shots are like mine.. I have a lot of the same posers..
It was good to meet up..and hope we do it again sometime..

have a good Christmas.. All the best...

Steward

I love these shots. They are incredibly cute little fellers. I have one question - have you applied a gausian filter to the backgrounds or was the blurred background the result of your depth of field??? I'd like to know how you got that effect.
Thanks,
Joan

sorry - I don't know what I did to insert the "sad face". Not intended.

Great series of beautiful red squirrel shots - but why "red tree RATS? "

Joan Lovell wrote in post #2440654
I love these shots. They are incredibly cute little fellers. I have one question - have you applied a gausian filter to the backgrounds or was the blurred background the result of your depth of field I'd like to know how you got that effect.
Thanks,
Joan

Hi Joan, the blurred background is due to the very short DOF I was working with. The squirrels were quite close (a few metres away) and the background was quite some distance away as the small log in the shots was on a small rise in the ground (the 'ground level' shots were actually taken resting the camera on a waist level fence). As I was using a 100-400L at 400mm, wide open at f5.6, DOF was minimal. Looking at the shots that look along the log (2 & 5 for example), the log only comes into focus just in front of the squirrel and the shot is going out of focus again by the squirrels tail. That means the useable sharpness only covered a distance of less than a foot.

Having said that, I did apply a touch of blurring to some but it wasn't sufficient to actually affect the level of visual blur. I used the soften brush at about 4 or 5% to flick over the background, not to blur it but to reduce the harshness of the visible noise in the image (most were taken at 1600 ISO). If you look at shot 7, which is a tighter crop and so shows the noise more, you can see the difference around the edge of the squirrel, particularly around the whiskers away from the body. Not wanting to soften the whiskers I went around them, so you can see the background behind them is slightly noisier than that to the left of the image. As you can see though, this isn't sufficient to affect the degree of ' out of focus' blur it just helps give a slightly smoother bokeh by reducing noise (I don't have any software such as noise ninja).

I hope this helps.

Oh and don't worry about the sad face, that happens when you type multiple question marks.

scrumpy wrote in post #2440905
Great series of beautiful red squirrel shots - but why "red tree RATS? "

It's an affectionate term, hey, I like rats !!

I would have used 'red squirrels' as the thread heading, but there have been other 'red squirrel' threads recently so I wanted to differentiate it, so people wouldn't mix them up when looking at the list in the forum.

(insert mental smilie here, I can't because it counts as an image and I'll get moderated - smilie again).

i love formby point, the Tree Rats are fantastic there ! Been a few times and have several pics on my site, you have done well here

Tree rats? I think they are cute! Great shots.

Shaun

Nice captures. Cute little buggers. Their eyes sure are expressive. I think you did well. Was it fun having a buddy from POTN to shoot with? I have been emailing someone here and we plan to shoot together come the new year.

Thanks Ian, Shaun and JoeGolf. Your comments are appreciated.

Had a good mooch around your galleries Ian, some very nice stuff in there, we seem to have similar tastes in subjects.

JoeGolf, yes, it's always a pleasure (for me, anyway) to meet up with other like minded photographers. You never know what tips you may pick up and it can be handy when the lighting is dodgy, having someone to hold reflectors etc.

The longest joint shoot I did was with a photographer I met from another site, we rented a cottage in Cornwall for a week and travelled around the area doing shoots every day. Great week, dramatically cut the expenses for the week as we shared petrol, cottage hire etc. and it was more fun than going away on my own as I usually do (only another photographer can understand that you absolutely have to wait an hour - in the middle of nowhere - for the light to be 'just right').

Super shots, light really has been a problem in the North West over christmas and the new year, here's to better weather.

sandpiper wrote in post #2448126
Had a good mooch around your galleries Ian, some very nice stuff in there, we seem to have similar tastes in subjects.

Thanks im still slowly rebuilding them after deciding i had too much of my old stuff in there, and just deleting the whole gallery and starting again Need to update the aviation stuff next !

Oh and Tree Rat is affectionate towards these little critters, although their grey cousins well we wont even go there !

All good shots, especially like 1,3 and 8. Wish we had a few more 'reds' around Hertforshire.