Squirrelly goodness (just a couple of issues...)

I was out on a long walk, camera in tow as usual. I came across this squirrel happily munching away on a low branch, so I just pulled my camera out of the front of my jacket where I was keeping it warm and snapped off this shot before the squirrel ran away.

At first the leaf that is now just to the right of the squirrel was in front of it, so I moved a little to my left to get it out of the way. Good.

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However, I made a very common photography mistake - I was so focused on the squirrel, my eye totally edited out the small branch that is running across the squirrel's face. Normally this shot would go straight to "delete" as a result, but I am trying to save my best rejects for here.

Another common mistake I have made in this shot is to place the subject dead in the center of the shot. This is easy to do - firstly, you are focused on the subjece, so it's natural to put it in the center of the frame. Secondly, you want the camera to focus on the subject, so if you are using autofocus, you place it in the middle of the frame and press the button down halfway to get the focus. Then if you are not thinking, you just take the picture.

If you stop and think for a moment, this could be a far more interesting shot if the squirrel wasn't in the middle. Having it in the middle leaves nothing for your eye to do - it's just the way your eye works. It goes to the middle of the shot, and now it sits there. I'm not using the lines in this pic as best I can.

In my defense, I usually take squirrel pics with the intention of cropping anyhow - even with my zoom lens at zoom extension, this is about the closest I can hope to get to a squirrel (though I have been sneaky and managed to get within a couple of feet of one with a lot of patience and a few nuts to share). So I can choose to crop this pic the way I would frame it if I could have gotten close enough. I bought a 9 megapixel camera so that I could get shots like these and crop them and still maintain fairly high resolution in the shot. It's lazy photography though, to always count on cropping to save me.

First thing I notice looking at this pic and thinking about framing is the direction the squirrel is facing - right. While rules are meant to be broken, one good rule is to think about leaving more space in the direction an animal or person is facing, particularly if they are moving. This gives the idea of movement, that they are moving into your shot. Also there are the great lines of the thicker tree branches leading off to the right and top of the picture which can make great lines to lead the eye with, and perhaps add to the sense of movement in the picture, as these are the two paths the squirrel is most likely to take if it runs away from me.

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I like the single leaf below left of the squirrel, so I keep that in the frame, and crop up and across from there. The body of the squirrel is still mostly in the middle of the pic, but it is the eye we are most drawn to in an animal, and that is now up in the middle top, which is a bit better. If I was following the rule of thirds I might compose it a little differently, but I think I like this ok - except for that darn stick!

The squirrel is a bit underexposed (I should have used a slightly lower shutter speed, but then I would have risked overexposing the sky, and that would have been harder to fix). In Paintshop Pro XI I used Clarify (strength 5) to compensate for that, then used Unsharp Mask (Strength = 2) to sharpen it up a little. I might try and tweak it more if it was worth it, but the little branch I failed to notice means it really isn't worthwhile.