Secret squirrels
Capture charmingly cheeky squirrels with these tips
Red squirrels look cute and adorable all-year round, but they look particularly vibrant in winter when their alluring coats make them pop out from a snowy white backdrop. Unsurprisingly though, they’re very fast… so for this technique we’ll be covering how to maintain a pin-sharp focus on unpredictable subjects and optimize the autofocus performance for moving subjects by customizing your Canon DSLR, or mirrorless, camera’s settings.
Due to declining numbers, red squirrels can only be seen in Northern parts of the UK and small pockets of the South, or Northern Ireland, so venture to a wildlife park in one of these places where they’re known to be regularly sighted. If that’s not practical, the skills you’ll learn here can be easily transferred to any other fast moving animals such as owls, foxes mallards, robins and so on.
01 BANISH THE BLUR
Wild animals aren’t best known for sitting still and posing for pictures, so quick subjects like squirrels and birds require a few settings to ensure sharp shots. The first is opening your aperture to a wide value such as f/2.8 to let in as much available light as possible. Then increase your ISO until you get a shutter speed of 1/2000 sec or faster. Shooting at such a speed will reduce the possibility of camera-shake and also freeze the fast moving subject. Now activate your Continuous High drive mode so you can take a burst of shots in quick succession.
02 TRACK MOVING ANIMALS ACCURATELY
Go into your Canon camera’s Quick menu and change the AF mode to AI Servo. This mode will keep focus on wherever you’ve placed the active autofocus point, so long as you are half-pressing the shutter button, or AF-ON button if you set up back-button focusing (see panel). The middle AF point is, usually, the most responsive and accurate phase-detect AF point on DSLRS, but some models have a Zone AF mode that allows you to set a group of AF points that the camera can switch between to focus on. This is useful for fast-moving wildlife.
03 OPTIMIZE YOUR AUTOFOCUS
Many advanced Canon bodies, such as the 7D Mark II or 5D Mark IV, allow you to set how the camera responds to movement when autofocusing. Go into the AF menu and set it to AF Case 3, which is usually best for moving animals and birds, setting the Tracking Sensitivity to +1, Acceleration / Deceleration Tracking to 1 and AF point switching remains at 0. Some Canon cameras don’t have these cases, but still contain autofocus customization – you’ll find it in the Custom Function II: Autofocus section, where you can set the same parameters as above.