You had interesting climatic conditions here. Falling snow and sunshine at the same time, and if I look at the snow flakes it looks like you used flash too, although that had little effect on the squirrel. I suppose there was a bit too much going on all at once to get this just right. Perhaps you could have got the squirrel looking better, you had good conditions for photographing a silhouette, for example, he had to move at some point… But this photo is a good example of one of those difficult and technical lighting situations which we either manage just right, or else miss completely. One of the most important rules in photography, and it applies even more so now we shoot digitally, is that whites should not be burned out (ok, there are exceptions to all rules). Basically burned-out white areas contain no digital information, they are like holes in your photo, should you make a print those areas would just be paper with no ink. It is very important to expose your photo whilst considering the lightest zones, (look at your histogram). So here you had a very tricky scene to get right – all those snow flakes in the sunlight and the dark side of a squirrel to expose correctly… Falling snow with flash can be really nice but you need to expose correctly, the flash is a good idea to lighten the dark side of the squirrel. It is useful to know that a flash from flash light is extremely fast, much faster than your usual shutter speed, and so, unlike the aperture, you can change your shutter settings and not affect the dose of flashlight in your photo. Daylight of course will be affected. In this picture your flash has burned the snow flakes taking away all of their detail. A slower shutter speed would have kept the exposure on the squirrel the same, while a smaller aperture would have reduced the flash light on the snow flakes.
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