Playing

That is, I was playing. The squirrel was busily engaged in the serious business of finding food - here I think it has a partly-eaten maple seed in its mouth.

I was wandering along the south side of the River Avon at Stratford this afternoon, pointing the R5 at whatever caught my eye, and spotted the little guy in the gloom beneath the trees in the fenced area around the Colin Witter Lock. I simply lifted the camera and aimed it, and as soon as it woke up the focusing system activated and found the squirrel's eye, without me even pressing any buttons. I was so surprised, I almost failed to take the shot. 

By the time I reached the open stretch of water outside the theatre, I was so inspired by the quality of the auto-focus that I was even snapping away at birds as they flew past, knowing that in today's dreadful light I couldn't dial in a fast enough shutter speed for crisp flight shots, but just experimenting to see what the camera could do. And feeling very happy, and very lucky.

The one issue with this photo is, of course, the annoying grass stalk that cuts across the squirrel, which I've failed to clone out this evening, despite several attempts with different editing tools. I'd like to suggest to Canon (and I don't expect to be paid for this idea - they can have it completely free) that the next generation of their professional level cameras should come equipped with a little gardening robot, to tidy around your subject and remove any irritating distractions from the frame before you press the shutter button. Then they really will have made the perfect wildlife camera.