Amazing Squirrels
Category: Just Plain Silly... Nature... Photography...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 at 12:58 PM [GMT-6]

One day last week, while MLB was home during the day, we decided to practice some of our dance steps in anticipation of last Saturday's President's Ball. We usually practice in our game room, which is the only area of the house with enough open space. During the day, we leave our door open so that we can have a view of the backyard through the glass storm door.

So, we were gliding (a euphemism for "stumbling") about, practicing some swing steps (which we are really not very good with), when we happened to glance out the back door, whereupon we both immediately burst into laughter at what we saw:

This squirrel was standing a couple of feet from the door, peering through the glass at us. He had apparently been walking by when he happened to look in and -- well, obviously, he couldn't believe what he was seeing. In fact, he stood like that for more than a minute (long enough for me to grab my camera and snap a couple of shots), trying to comprehend the sight. I have no idea what was going through his tiny little brain, but his body language speaks volumes.

It's humbling to know that our dancing is a source of amusement to varmints.

By the way, do you remember my mention of a photo processing program called Photomatix Pro? You can refresh your memory here, as desired. This program is used to combine photos taken with different exposures, yielding a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image that can be quite spectacular. But I've found another use for the program and that is to rescue a poor shot. In this case, as you can tell, the squirrel was standing in the shade, but right in front of a brightly sunlit section of the patio. Because there was a glass door between us, I couldn't use a fill flash, nor did I have time to set up a tripod for a shutter speed slow enough to brighten the squirrel. The image I did capture is shown at right.

I could have done some tedious processing in Photoshop to lighten the squirrel without blowing out the background, but instead I used the Levels command in Photoshop to create a new image with a lightened squirrel AND a totally blown-out background. I then used Photomatix to combine the original photo and the new one, with the result being the one you see at the top of the page.

You may not run into a lot of situations where you need something like this, but it really came in handy this time.