Pigmy rattlesnake

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Sigma 180 5.6 macro, Velvia.

-- Peter May (peter.may@stetson.edu), March 09, 1999

Answers

The snake is nicely set in its habitat...just wish that its head was more clearly defined and set apart from the body.

-- Rose-Marie Burke (rmbehr@istar.ca), March 09, 1999.

Thanks, Rose-Marie. You're right, of course. Its a funny point you raise, though - these snakes never coil with their head in an apparent, exposed position. I have seen thousands (really! I do research on them) of these guys in their coiled position, and often their head is totally cryptic against the background of their body coils. Makes sense when you realize that this is a hunting posture, they're ambush predators, and they are "trying" to be as inconspicuous as possible. Of the hundreds of pictures I've taken of them (mostly really, really bad), this is one with a relatively quite conspicuous head.

Peter

-- Peter May (peter.may@stetson.edu), March 09, 1999.


I like the way the curve of the big leaf that this guy is leaning against matches the curve of the back of the body, and similarly the curve of the dry grass near the left edge of the photo matches the curve of the front of the body.

Pigmy rattlesnake indeed. This snake would certainly sound a lot more macho if it had a different name. Perhaps "warrior rattlesnake" or "death rattler". Peter, I think you should work on this as a corollary to your research. You wouldn't want people to think you're avoiding the more frightening serpents.

-- John Sullivan (sullivan@spies.com), March 09, 1999.


Peter,

I know how tough it is working with live, wild creatures, so this is not intended as a jibe. Since you do lots of images of pygmy rattlers how about making yourself a standard flash setup that puts one light off to the side? You may be able to throw a shadow on the snake's head to separate it from the body and put a catchlight in the animal's eye at the same time.

Good luck.

Frank

-- Frank Kolwicz (bb389@lafn.org), March 09, 1999.


Peter: Frank's suggestion of a flash setup might help, but also consider emphasizing the snake's camoflage. I think I'd try shooting directly overhead, taking only a few of coils of the body and the head of the snake, thereby eliminating most of the background.

-- Steve Kaufman (skphoto@xyz.net), March 10, 1999.


Thanks to both Frank and Steve for your suggestions. The flash idea is a good one - recently I've been concentrating on doing away with flash and trying to get decent natural light shots, but an off-axis flash would be really interesting to experiment with. Re your comments, Steve, its worth a try. I think of myself as more of an unimaginative, "documentary" style nature photogapher - I generally try to depict the organism and some of its environment in a realistic and technically correct way. Pretty boring, huh? The idea of changing perspectives and looking for different patterns is a good one, though I'm probably not the best one to implement it. I'll give it a shot. Thanks for your advice.

-- Peter May (peter.may@stetson.edu), March 10, 1999.

Peter: Your pygmy rattlesnake photo is a very nice image. I know and appreciate how difficult it can be to photograph some snakes in an environmental setting. Without cooling them, some species don't like to stay in front of the camera in that nice setting!

Some times we tend to ignore other perspectives on a subject we often see and photograph. If you have the time and opportunity when photographing a subject to explore different perspectives, you may come up with a few startling images which are not the run of the mill stock shot, but one which will make all the rest of us say to ourselves "now why didn't I think of that?"

-- Steve Kaufman (skphoto@xyz.net), March 11, 1999.


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