In Pursuit of Uniqueness, Angry Colorado Ground Squirrel in RMNP

Recently, I shared another weasel image from Rocky Mountain National Park. Today, I share what it was looking for. More specifically, the weasel was looking for this ground squirrel's young to take back to its own young.

Wildlife encounters often provide the opportunity to capture multiple images. While capturing multiple images of the same pose is a good idea, ensuring that minimally one is sharp, with ideal focus and lack of motion blur, there is little value in having more than one image of the same pose and subject framing in the keepers folder. However, photographing a different pose (or scene framing) has great merit. Different is good, and better is ... even better. Therefore, constantly look for ways to improve upon your images already on the card.

While ground squirrels are not too difficult to photograph, they are not always posed on a rock with a distant green background as nicely as this one. After aligning the subject against a distant background while maintaining a favorable body position (angled slightly toward the camera) and capturing the insurance (or memory) shots, improving upon what was already captured became the goal.

The ground squirrel was sounding an urgent alarm to the rest of the family, and its mouth briefly opened very wide with each warning chirp. Simply timing the shot for the toothy chirp added that extra something I was looking for, evoking emotion, at least in context with the weasel story.