Giant Malabar Squirrel

Giant Malabar Squirrel shot at Mahabaleshwar.
Nilon D3300 F/6.3 1/160 ISO-3200 Tamron 18-200mm
Image cropped & corrected in Capture NX-D

Nice first post :). Good you got it in the clear with a good eye contact. Due to the crop there seems to be some loss of details. How much of crop is it? A more rectangular composition would look good than the present square one. Its difficult to get them close, as they are quite high up in the canopy, so you could have tried to create an environmental composition. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks, it was indeed a challenge capturing it so high in the canopy with bright sky behind the foliage I' making it backlit. I'll try to improve on composition. Crop was 15% maybe. More space behind the subject and less on the lower right corner would be better ? Thanks for your appreciation.

When you crop images, the imperfections get magnified. Since you were using an 18-200 lens, which is basically a wide to intermediate focal length lens, it is very important to compose images as per the focal length. A ratufa indica high up on a tree branch most of the times require a long telephoto lens. In the absence of a long tele you have to crop to show the closeup and that means you lose most of the details in the image. You can see that the edge of the fur has got sharpening artifacts.

It is important to click images as per the strength of the lens. So better to shoot landscapes as well as environmental portraits with this lens. It is challenging to create a pleasing environmental portrait as just one branch/stick/leaf or some element out of place can result in a not so pleasing image. However, that discipline makes us concentrate more to create pleasing compositions.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

Good eye contact. Nice pose captured. Composition is fine. Thanks for sharing. SaktiWild