This weekend just gone, Tom, Eleanor and I went to Centre Parcs at Whinfell Forest. We had a great time! One of the things that I got to do that counted as “me time”, was a wildlife photography session. I was lucky and got the instructor all to myself, so we spent an hour and a half on a chilly morning taking photographs of red squirrels and birds. I took about 500 photos (a lot of those on burst mode to try to capture one good shot!) and have whittled those down to 198. Out of those, some are still a bit blurry and some are duplicates, so realistically I think I have 100 or so decent shots. Out of those, there are a small handful that I love.
First up, red squirrels. I’ve never seen red squirrels in the wild before. It was amazing experience. They are such amazing, quirky little reatures. I got loads of the classic squirrel pose, but these ones are a little bit different:
I love the fact that the squirrel is looking directly into the camera. About a second after this photo was taken, it ran off!
I kept missing a chance at photographing a squirrel standing on is hind legs. It was the shot I really wanted to get. About a minute before we were going to move off to photograph birds, I caught this shot:
When we moved to the bird hide, we were really lucky in that a woodpecker showed up. It was really, really shy. It was hiding behind a tree right in front of me and kept peeking round. I took tons of shots. Sadly, most of them were sightly out of focus, but I think this one is pretty decent:
At some point, I’ll post some more pictures from the session. There are some incredibly cute ones of the squirrels and I even managed to get a few “action” shots that weren’t hopelessly blurred!
From a non-technical point of view, I still like this photograph. I like the paused pose and the sparkle in the squirrel’s eyes. Red squirrels really are amazing creatures.
