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Saturday, March 12, 2011

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



If you are so inclined, please feel free to leave any comments or feedback. Also remember that clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos) in various sizes. If you enjoyed this post, please take the time to pass my post(s) on to others whom you also feel would enjoy my work. Thanks for stopping by!


3 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness! Awesome Brian, although I think you would be right on track if this was a brown squirrel. They are mean!

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  2. Oh my WORD! A gamma rayed, utterly crazed, completely outta control squirrel with popcorn on his mind! Oh, the horror!! Err, well. LOL What a different image and post today Brian, how totally entertaining, I love it! Totally creative processing and a really cool end result!

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  3. How did I miss this 'cute' little guy??
    WILD!

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