Chipmunk Eating Breakfast

Growing up in Southern California, we didn't have chipmunks so it's still somewhat of a novelty for me to see them. They are so fast though, that they are very hard to photograph. Since I had my dog Poppy with me, this was as close as I was able to get, and this is with my camera on full zoom. I'm still surprised he didn't scamper away.

This afternoon I downloaded a couple of free trial photoshop plug-ins from Alien Skin Software. Unless I pay for them, they will be be deactivated in 15 days, but until then they sure are fun to play with. One of the plug-ins is called Bokeh, which allows you to play with the depth of field and focus, the other one is called Exposure and it allows you to replicate the look of different film stocks. In this image I used the bokeh filter to isolate the chipmunk and a color film filter that faded everything except for strong reds.