Foxes

I collected the SD cards from my two trailcams over the weekend, which had accumulated about 4,000 images during April and the first week of May. I was looking for something other than the deer that are out there nearly every night, and, as expected, they were the majority (more than 2,000) of the images that were not triggered by wind or rain. There were a total of eleven where the fox (I'm pretty sure there was only one) was facing in the cameras' general direction. The eleven source photographs were taken in two groups over two nights, between which a deer got overly curious and nosed the camera slightly out of level. The nighttime exposures meant the images were B&W infrared images.

Combining these eleven was more complex than I had hoped, mostly because the nighttime exposures were long enough that the moving foxes were somewhat blurry. Masking blurry images is difficult. Secondarily, the fox's position along the trail overlapped between the two days' exposures, so I could not simply put them in chronological order.

While I thought the B&W version was spooky enough to be interesting, I decided to colorize it. The first attempt was with Photoshop's neural colorization filter. This was not really satisfactory, so I tried Palette.FM, which was much better although I did fiddle with their settings a bit.

I'm still undecided whether the color version is more interesting or not.

I've been trying all night to come up with a better (funnier) title but all I could think of was Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin looking for a different sort of foxes on Saturday Night Live nearly fifty years ago. They were really wild and crazy guys. You whippersnappers can probably find educational clips of them on Youtube.