It's not as exciting to photograph a squirrel in winter as it is a snowy owl or a polar bear, but I was still happy to capture this. I took it a few years ago in the middle of Central Park in New York City with a 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto. I was only about 25 feet away, and that meant depth of field was going to be quite shallow. I closed the lens to f/11 at ISO 200, although today with the ability to use high ISO settings without really worrying about noise, I would have used f/16 or f/22 and around 800 ISO. My shutter was 1/200, which is too slow for such a big lens, but because I was shooting with a tripod, I knew I could get away with a slower shutter. The overcast sky was ideal. The exposure was determined by a Sekonic handheld meter on incident mode. Note the detail and texture in the foreground snow. This kind of exposure accuracy in tenths of an f/stop is a trademark of high-end light meters. This picture is uncropped.
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