{"id":1035,"date":"2007-12-30T23:12:54","date_gmt":"2007-12-30T23:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1035"},"modified":"2013-11-23T11:28:43","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T11:28:43","slug":"two-foxes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/two-foxes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Two foxes"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

I'm trying to follow what the general pattern of movement is with the foxes, but without much success. Certainly there's a young fox which pops into a garden opposite early to mid evening most nights. It may be the one I saw at the end of our road on Christmas Day<\/a>, or possibly the shy vixen out on the prowl. I'm never close enough to tell, but I did see it trot away down the road a couple of nights ago, so it may not be one of ours. As for the vixen, she seems to be using our rear garden as a thoroughfare more than anything else. I've noticed her cross the garden on several occasions, rarely pausing for more than a moment or two. She passed through again this morning (I presume going 'out'), stopping briefly to have a scratch. This was at about 11.30. The photo was taken through a window.
<\/span> Late morning vixen<\/span><\/p>\n

She returned about three hours later, entering from where she'd exited earlier. I was able to slip outside with the camera. Her curiosity was enough to cause her to pause long enough for a single shot before she disappeared through the fence.
<\/span> Mid afternoon vixen<\/span><\/p>\n

No such problems in photographing the old dog fox. He showed up early evening (17.40) and stayed for about 15 minutes (or long enough for 50+<\/sup> frames). Part of the attraction was some leftovers which gave me a chance to observe his caching behaviour. And he caches everywhere.
<\/span> Behind the pond<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> In the flower bed<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> In the herb bed<\/span><\/p>\n

The only place he scent marked was the bowl the scraps were in… when it was empty. He's done this in the past, and it suggests that he marks the places where he's removed food rather than where he's stored it. :confused:<\/p>\n

And since it cropped up in the comments recently, I'll just mention the problem of eye-shine when using flash. If you are close enough to an animal, the flash misses their eyes and you get a nice black pupil. When I'm photographing the wood mouse<\/a> I'm usually so close that there's no problem at all, and none of the mouse shots has been re-touched. With the foxes, distance tends to vary rather more. Most of the shots are as they come from the camera (apart from minor sharpening and noise reduction), but occasionally I do re-touch their eyes. If the eye-shine is bad (mostly on long distance shots taken from 20-30 feet away) I rarely bother as the shine destroys most of the detail around the eye as well, but from slightly closer in it can be worth the effort. Here's an example:
<\/span> The bright blue eye-shine is typical of foxes.<\/span><\/p>\n

To eliminate it I use one of two possible techniques. It's sometimes possible to get good results with the red-eye filter on my image editing software (I just use the eye-drop tool to select the correct 'red' colour to filter). Alternatively (and I use this mostly when the eye-shine is white) I simply use a paintbrush tool set to about 3 or 5 pixels wide by 5 or 7 pixels high, and with a 50% soft edge. I explode the image to about 800% and then paint in the black pupil pixel by pixel, and if necessary add a white reflection (using a 3×3 pixel brush). Occasionally I combine both techniques. It depends very much on the evenness of the eye-shine. Here's the re-touched version of the previous photo.
<\/span> Re-touched eyes<\/span><\/p>\n

Camera note: Vixen photographed with the EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens. The dog fox photographed with the EF 24-105 F4L IS USM and Canon 430EX flash unit.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1128,40],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foxes","tag-fox","tag-photography","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t