I had a tough time deciding what I wanted to submit this month. I took a lot of shots this month and I got some great technical photos, but nothing really stuck out at me for composition. I shot this little guy yesterday, and right after I shot it I thought it had potential due to the way the branch that he was sitting on was.
This is a wild chipmunk.
Shot hand held with my 400mm at 1/640. Had to bump the ISO up to 800 to get that shutter speed. The DOF is razor thin because I was wide open with an aperture of 5.6. No way I could close it up. I'm always a light hog :-p
This is a pretty large crop, but this lens is so sharp that I feel I can usually get away with it. Did I crop a little too much and loose a little sharpness? Maybe, I can't tell, I go back and forth between yes and no. I guess I'll find out. I was limited with my cropping options due to some leaves and I liked this the best so I could place his eyes on the upper third.
PP was pretty simple.
-Little bit of neat image. Lost a little detail in the white under his chin, but it blended with the bokeh and I wanted to get rid of the background noise. I think doing a selection on him would have been tough.
-converted to LAB mode for curves
-cropped
-little bit of burning on areas I wanted to darken up
-resize
-add border
-sharpen
-slight selective sharpen on the eye
If anyone actually reads this, sorry for writing a book about this photo!
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Haha! Great shot. Ever-so-small complaint: I wish the face were just a tad more in-focus/sharp. I don't know why I feel that it isn't, but it just doesn't pop as much as I would like. On another note, great foreground bokeh - I think it works very well with the 'hiding' idea.
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