Eastern Chipmunks are pretty ubiquitous little creatures in the woods.

They are often seen and heard on any hike.

I find Eastern Chipmunks to be quite adorable critters and they make good photography subjects.

But despite their omnipresence the Eastern Chipmunks can be challenging photography subjects.

Eastern Chipmunks do not sit still very long. So as a photographer you have to find them, train your lens on them and take the photo fairly quickly.

You also need a relatively fast shutter speed to capture them crisply especially if they move.

And to get close up as a photographer you may need a longer telephoto lens which will also require a fast shutter speed to avoid camera shake.

And the faster shutter speed can be difficult to achieve because chipmunks often live in the woods and the woods tend to be relatively dark due to the tree canopy.

To capture this image I had to crank up my ISO to 1600. And that still only got me to a 1/250 sec shutter speed.

I was pretty happy with the sharpness of the photo considering the less than ideal 1/250 shutter speed.

The high ISO created some amount of noise/grain in the image. So I leaned into that aspect in Lightroom and used a preset that accentuated the grain/noise look. This also brought out a lot of detail in the Eastern Chipmunk and made it look very sharp.

Photo details: Nikon D300. Nikon 300mm f/4. Focal length 420mm. ISO 1600. 1/250 sec. f/5.6.

Thank you for joining me on the blog today for this close up look at an Eastern Chipmunk.

Check out this image as an Eastern Chipmunk peaks out from a tree.