It was -5 outside, I’d just updated to the latest D3 firmware, had a couple of spare hours to get out in the snow for the first time AND the weather was perfect. Surely I was going to get loads of snowy wildlife shots…surely…? Nope! Just the one shot, but it did make a brief appearance on Sky News at least.
Of course my main mistake was going to a local park, instead of out in to the countryside, which was more like a war zone with all the people out throwing snowballs etc. Still, it is my closest area of ‘wilderness’ and as I only had a couple of hours spare it was not only my obvious choice but really, my only one. I started filming with the grand plan to show you my afternoon out and have a video full of wonderful snowy images, but alas that was not meant to be…but I thought I’d make a little video anyway, as I often find ‘behind the scenes’ stuff fun to watch so hopefully some of you out there will too, and as I mentioned above and as you’ll see in the video, the shot I got made it on to Sky News at least, so a fun little outcome for an otherwise disappointing day.
Snowy Squirrel
So here it is, my only real photographic opportunity came from seeing a few squirrels running around digging up food they had previously buried. They’d run to a spot, dig through the snow to get to the nuts etc then run up the nearest tree to eat. All but this one squirrel would run off before I was able to get close enough, this one howecer let me get a few shots off before making a run for it (check out that pretty thin tail!). So the day wasn’t a total loss!
Nikon D3, 600mm + 1.4x TC, 1/800, f8, ISO 2200, +1 EV
I had also just updated my firmware on the D3 to the new version 2.02 so was interested to see how the Auto White Balance improvement would work…not that I have ever really had much issue with it in the past anyway…well, as you can see it dealt with this snowy scene just fine, no real colour cast present on my screen at least (ignoring the awful red colour cast on the Sky News plasma screen in the video) so just as good as ever in my opinion. Guess I’d need a second, old firmware D3 to really see if there is much improvement!
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