Early morning squirrel, by Words
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| Click image to see a larger view in Words' gallery. |
Almost two years ago, Words was featured in a remarkable DPNow Picture of the Day featuring a superb portrait of a wild fox. Words is back again, this time with a picture of the fox's occasional prey, a squirrel, in silhouette profile early one morning. The generic rodent-like features made me initially think this was a rat! But let's hear from Words how this picture was taken:
"The photo was taken early in the morning, before I headed off to work. Our garden faces due East, which makes it almost impossible to photograph anything at that time of day without going to the far end and getting some light behind you. I'd probably gone out in the vain hope that I'd see a fox (occasional morning visitors), and to check what birds were about.
"As I stepped outside I saw some movement along the fence at the far end of the garden. I was looking straight into the light. The sun was still low (otherwise I'd have probably blinded myself), but the squirrel is such a rare visitor to the garden that I thought I'd grab a shot. The camera was set to ISO 800 (we have a lot of shade so I tend to set it high), with an aperture of f/6.3. I underexposed by -1.0 which was an attempt to control the extreme backlight.
"This is the opposite to my usual technique of over-exposing to draw out the subject. I processed the RAW file into black and white, and then added sepia tones and some sharpening. The shot was taken with the Canon 400D and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens, at 400mm focal length."
And I think it's a great result.
You can see more of Words' work in his DPNow gallery - and it's well worth a look.
Would you like one of your pictures featured on DPNow's POTD?
We are always on the look out for great pictures posted to the user-galleries here on DPNow. POTDs are selected from the gallery and featured every week day. The gallery facility here is completely free; all you need to do is register as a user on our discussion forum and you will get an automatic 25MB of space, which is good for around 125 pictures uploaded at web resolution, about 200K per picture. At the time of writing we had just over10,000 pictures on the galleries and it's well worth a browse.
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