stuck my nose outside!

[jonny_redhorse]

and took one pic! ......when that air hit me at 29 below(my nose hairs took a beating for about 3 minutes)....the pic of this squirrel was good enough ....then proceeded to sip on my morning coffee jonny

same squirrel a week later...I think he's getting fatter

[Steve Foss]

Hey Jonny, I HEAR you! I've got 3.7 Gb of images in the hopper from earlier today. Sure am glad I was only out for an hour or two and the rest of it can be done indoors at the computer. It never hit -40 like the NWS pukes said, but it also stayed well below zero all day, and that wind didn't let up once.

Ouch!

Nice capture there on Mr. Red. Wonder how long he stayed out. Probably just long enough to model for you and grab up a snack for later when the Squirrel Bowl is on.

[floating minnow]

That's a mighty good shot for "good enough".

[jonny_redhorse]

Lol!..thanks all!..wasn't trying to break any records on quality or perfection for sure at those temps..the motors in the camera were workin overtime to even get that shot ....I threw out 50 pounds of black oil seeds last saturday.......GONE ...this squirrel has been living like a fat hog for a few weeks.....threw out over 100 pounds so far....geesh those squirrels and chickadees(and an odd assortment of jays(blue and greys) can sure chow down ....

[Redstormy]

Johnny well you're my hero for even sticking your head out the door.. I would kill for a pair of mukluks right now myself. I swear my feet will never be warm again. Love the picture.

Red

[carlcmc]

nice pic. like the sharpness.

stcatfish. You shot 3.7gb in one day? How do you store so much? do you aggressively go through and delete a bunch of shots?

[Steve Foss]

Carl, I have 8 Gb worth of cards. I shoot RAW + small jpeg, so each image takes up 7 to 8 Mb. Get 120 or 130 of those and suddenly you're at 1 Gb. I shoot in burst mode a lot, because it's the best way at max 5 fps with my camera to get that perfect comp on a moving subject. In a burst of half a dozen images, one almost always will have a composition better than all the rest, and, quite often, you'll find that the first image in a burst is a bit soft because of hand shake (sometimes the finger gives the shutter button a little punch that jars the camera at the start) and that as you move through the burst they sharpen up. That's especially true when your shutter speed is slow enough to be marginal for the subject.

When shooting a wedding, which I shoot in large jpeg mode so I can burn CD/DVD images for the customer to print, I may shoot 2,000 images from wedding morning throught the evening wedding dance (later sorting to winnow it down to 500-800 to give the client), and the average large jpeg with my camera is 3 Mb.

So, you can see how quickly a person could approach 4 Gb. I've shot all 8 Gb in the morning and come home to download or downloaded to a laptop in the field and then gone back out in the afternoon/evening and loaded the cards up again. Makes for a lot of computer work after the fact, but that's why I gang small jpeg with the RAW, so it's easy to view the little one and cast off the pair if I don't like them.

If I shoot 4 Gb, I generally don't keep and store more than half that. I have a 280 Gb supplementary hard drive that, in two years, has about 210 Gb used, and I back all that up on CD/DVD. As the drive closes in on being filled, I'll spend three solid days sorting and dumping images that may have made the cut two years ago but don't anymore when compared with more recent work. And then I'll buy another hard drive when that one's filled.

I can't stress the CD/DVD backup enough for those who want to preserve their work. Drives fail, and fires happen, and if your work is gone, it's gone forever.