Squirrel!!!!!!!!

There's a reason there's no badge for squirrel watching for three year olds and dogs. They have an innate need to chase and yell. And that's ok because squirrels don't exactly have long attention spans either unless there's food involved.

This is Cooper waiting.

I was lucky to capture that brief moment :-)

Cooper did a great job of putting out treats though. 

This guy sat up in a tree and watched while Cooper put out treats. 

And when Cooper and his grandpa were safely around the corner, just out of sight, helped himself. 

Earlier at the play park

Friends that showed up later:

Two birds is an interesting test of F-stops or focal length.

The depth that things appear in focus in.

When they are close to the same distance away from me they'll be in focus because I had a narrow distance set. I have the power to make the focal length quite a bit wider so the birds could be further apart but still in focus but then I'd lose my blurry background which ok sometimes too. The background is just blurred because it's so far out of  the set focal distance. A point and shoot camera changes this distance automatically but as a rule I think has a much further distance that is in focus and so generally gives a more realistic look into the distance. A lot of point and shoots have manual modes now too and I would be interested to see if they can recreate the blur (bokeh) effect as well as a DSLR.

Apparently I learn by doing and repetition because I could have read up on F stops till the birds flew home but until I did it many times and saw the difference it didn't sink in. Camera language makes very little sense to me because I'm not mathy, but that doesn't mean I can't learn!