You wouldn't like me when I'm angry

During our trip to Sea World last week I thought it would be clever to taunt some of the squirrels in the park with pieces of popcorn, only to pick it up, laughing, at the last second. My slight amusement was suddenly shattered when one of the squirrels, apparently angered by my actions, suddenly turned bright green and charged at me. The only plausible explanation for this is that the squirrel was exposed to extremely high levels of gamma radiation as part of a "super-squirrel-soldier" program, probably initiated by the United States Air Force. I was lucky to get this shot just before being viciously mauled in one of the only "squirrel on human" attacks ever reported in the history of Bexar County.

Actually, that story is 100% false and completely fictional. Today's photo is one that I took a bit of a creative approach to in creating. I saw this squirrel running around just off the path to the Steel Eel at Sea World San Antonio and took several shots to hopefully capture a good pose. Once I looked through the shots I decided that I liked this one the best and started to work on it. About halfway through processing I changed my mind and decided it to look unique, and totally unlike a normal squirrel. So, I messed around with several presets in Nik Color Efex Pro 3, tweaking them as I desired. I decided I liked the redness of the eyes and thought about just adding them to the shot, but I decided to play around a little bit more and got the final result.

I ended up with the overall green hue by adding a touch of Viveza to the shot, then blended the background of the original photo with the greenness of the squirrel, then added the red eyes with another layer. I blended all of them together and got this result, which I topped off by adding a little vignetting.

Hulk Squirrel

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