Red Squirrel

Please critique. Thanks, Tony

Nice portrait... On my monitor the highlights are overexposed.... It's a tough subject to get proper exposure on... If original is in RAW I'd dial back the exposure a half stop or so and see if you can get some details in the whites.

His ears are too short, can you grow them a little longer?

 

Nice shot, I think the .JPG compression has ruined his eyes though? Need to see a larger less compressed image to tell if the eyes turned out well.

Great close up, I think it's possible to fix the bit of overexposure on the whites, eye looks ok to me, large version is available above and shows a fair amount of noise that a noise filter would likely help with. Great shot worth the time to touch up! (I happen to love squirrels and photograph them frequently and have also struggled with exposure and sharpening, they're not easy subjects I think due to their coloration)

Thanks for the helpful comments. I toned down the highlights a little in RAW (I'm using CS3 beta) using the recover option and stopped down half a stop in the attached version. Incidently, this is a cropped version of the full picture on my photo.net site. So there is a little noise. Thanks again, Tony

I think that does it on the exposure. :)

Just a thought about the squirrel's eye. This is not a jpg artifact, but seems to be a reflection of the scene behind the camera, the squirrel is above the ground sitting on a rock. There's a white ski trail, and a line of jack-pine trees in the distance. The convex surface of the eye acts like a wide angle lens. The blip in the middle could be me. Tony :)