My first solo wildlife excursion.
It’s my first solo attempt at wildlife photography (well my first time bringing you with me), and to ensure that I manage to capture something, I have chosen my subject as the non-exotic, but incredibly accessible Grey Squirrel.
Now, I do feel like this is a bit of a cop out on my part as the greys are not native to the UK and cause controversy due to out competing our native red squirrels as well as causing damage to woodland, however, as a newbie to wildlife photography, I want to be able to learn as much as possible by actually seeing and photographing a subject which is why I have chosen to focus on these for my first solo adventure.
I am fortunate enough to live in a rural area and have been given permission by one of the local farms to explore and photography the wildlife there. So, I am heading out to a small area of woodland with some fallen trees, where I have seen a fair bit of squirrel activity.
The day has started out gloriously sunny and warm, which for the Easter bank holiday in the UK is rare! I am using my 70-200 f2.8 GM ii lens with my X2 teleconverter for my images today, as I no longer have the 200-600 G that I rented when in Scotland. This lens combo does work well for the most part, however I do find that when the subject is really small in the frame, it does tend to back focus, which is not ideal.
Once set up in my chosen spot, things get exciting as I spot a rabbit off down the track, in fact, there are a lot of rabbits running around down there, so that is something for me to remember when I want to have a good go at photographing those guys.
After the rabbits, comes a Red Kite, that flies right over where I am sat! Now unfortunately, due to my excitement I think I got my settings wrong as all my kite images are out of focus! Whoops! Now I did actually run these through Topaz Sharpen Ai which did an amazing job of fixing my mistake, but I feel that, due to the amount of sharpening that was needed, I feel like it was cheating. I have added the images below so you can see what I mean…
Soon after the encounter with the kite, a Tree Creeper briefly appeared, now I did see it again later on, but it went around the back side of the tree which was less than ideal!
Once that initial, frantic moment was over, everything went very quiet for a long time. Also, the beautiful weather changed somewhat to a very cold and windy morning. I did move myself down the hill a bit and more into the woodland to try and stay out of the worst of the wind, but it did little to keep warm.
Over an hour after getting set up, the squirrel activity started to heat up, and I was finally able to get some photos. One ran along a branch above me, which I was able to track all the way along as it then crossed down and along one of the fallen trees.
It was then, that I spotted a beautiful tiny rabbit sitting, incredibly well camouflaged, in the leaf litter by the fallen tree. This was a lovely encounter, and it came back a few times so I was able to get some lovely shots of this little beauty.
By now, I was getting very cold, having sat out in the wind for a while, fortunately, I spotted a squirrel posing on a branch right behind where the rabbit was sitting and got some lovely shots of that. I do wish I had a 200-600 lens, though, to get some better close-ups without having to do a massive crop on my images.
This squirrel then ran along the big fallen tree in front of me, stopping long enough for me to get a shot of it with its nut, before carrying on a bit further. I am really pleased with the shot along the log and I think it is one of my favourites of the squirrels, my best shot from the day though is that tiny rabbit amongst the leaf litter.
I hope you enjoyed the images I was able to capture when out in the woods, and I shall catch you next time.