Can you see me now?
Though the weather is usually dreadful this time of the year, the winter actually has one key advantage when it comes to taking photos of our arboreal friends. With the trees completely bare, the major visual obstruction to the highways and byways of the branches is gone… and it is so much easier to capture the squirrels as they frolic in their native 
environment. But even without their leaves, the twigs and branches that spiderweb every which way can still play havoc if there are enough of them between you and your subject… and that is because cameras like to default to focusing on the closest objects. Look at this beautiful squirrel inquisitively looking right at me from up in my backyard tree! Or, at least, try to imagine what he’d look like if he weren’t out of focus because of those stupid dangling branches! Arrrrrgghhhh!!! That was my one chance to capture him while he was making eye contact, and the camera doesn’t know that I’m trying to take pictures of squirrels and not ugly looking sticks…
Oh well, in focus or not, Saturday Squirrels still give us the warm fuzzies…
Have a great weekend everyone!
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Aw, look at him there. I bet he thinks he’s all hidden away.
I don’t know about that… he definitely saw me, and I’m surprised he didn’t run. My backyard squirrels are even more skittish than the park squirrels, and that picture was not taken from my window this time…
Awww, that’s so cute the way he’s looking right at you! It’s hard for me to imagine what it looks like with all the trees bare. Everywhere I look there are walls of evergreens. It is nice to still have some green (although it seems to blend with the sky to a dull gray/green) but all those evergreen branches block my view of sunrises, sunsets and squirrel shenanigans year round!
What are the squirrels going to build their nests from if they don’t have any dead leaves around? I think squirrels prefer winter nesting in evergreens since I’d guess they’re more insulated from the cold. My friend Wilson was building his nest in an evergreen, which was why I had to wait for him to come out to get his picture…
I’m not sure what the squirrels use for nesting material once all the deciduous leaves have grown soggy and started rotting. I’ve seen bark striped off branches, maybe they use that. I wish we’d get a good wind to knock a nest down so I could take a look at it. I’m curious now!
He’s still a cute squirrel. It’s like he’s photobombing your [intentional] picture of tree branches. And that’s cool.
An intentional picture of tree branches…. there is a concept you don’t hear about every day…
Auto focus ranks right there with autocorrect in our minds. 😈 Have a groovy weekend!
Yeah… all of this auto stuff is heavily overrated. Let’s get rid of Autotune while we’re at it and make these pop singers actually sing!
Yup. Really hard to get auto focus to find the squirrel rather than the branch. I can’t even get a picture of the moon. Too many trees!
And the moon is even further away than the squirrel is (I think, anyway). My camera doesn’t want to focus on the moon even in an empty sky. It just does what it wants… or whatever the last button I accidentally pressed tells it to do.
From what I can tell, this guy has an “extra fuzzy” tail AND he is looking right at you! Total squirrel cooperation but distinct lack of camera cooperation for sure.
Pam
It was a great look from my view… which I could have, of course, since you no longer have to look through a viewfinder to set up a shot. Then to see that I didn’t get the prize in the finished shot, AND he turned away before I could try again. Photography just isn’t fair…
Like many other things in life………….!