Need tips for photographing white and pink snakes

[nmoore601]

My photos of white snakes are horrible, capturing the pinks and lime greens on coral, neon, salmon snows is also difficult for me.

[dave partington]

And photoshop is not your friend.
It will make the white the camera captured pink, but then the green goes away. Or it makes what should be green in the picture, which is white when the camera captured the image, green, but then the pink goes away.
There's some other threads in this category on capturing pinks corals etc accurately. Might need to dig down a few pages.
Personally I never photoshop any image of anything for sale which is a living organism, with the exception of cropping, resizing, and optimizing (reducing file size). For images of NFS critters in the collection, sometimes I'll try to tweak them a bit, but then adjust the brightness/contrast so they appear duller on the screen then they do in real life, because otherwise some folks will scream 'photochopped!!!'. I am aware of a few sellers who dumb-down the colors of their snakes for sale, because they want to avoid the allegations of the originals being photochopped, and so the folks @ pets new home will be more then pleased with their new charges.
But even with all these options at the fingertips, there's a few individual snakes, regardless of morph, I will simply never color-capture accurately on a digi cam with the technology available today.

[SquamishSerpents]

Shoot in natural light and use a grey card to get the white balance correct.

[nmoore601]

Thanks Dave.

Squeamish what do you mean gray card? I'm not up to snuff on the camera terminology.

[SquamishSerpents]

You mean Squamish! Lol. Squamish is the city I live in, nobody really knows that though, haha! But you can call me Katia :)

If you're shooting with a DSLR there should be a setting for custom white balance. A grey card is something you use to tell the camera the exact K value (Kelvin, which is a measure of light "temperature") You know how some lightbulbs are called soft white, cool, etc, well that's because all kinds of light has different "color temperatures" which is what causes your photos to have weird color casts sometimes. Like if you've ever seen a photo of an albino ball python for example, where the whites look like they are blue. Or most notoriously in portraits where the subjects are in snow, sometimes it will look blue. That is caused by incorrect white balance.

So basically with a grey card, you take a photo of the grey card in the same place as your subject would be, and use that to set the white balance of your camera instead of letting the camera work it out. Because while cameras are smart, they really actually have no idea what the scene is "supposed" to look like!

Hope that helps at least a little bit, I'm kind of bad at explaining things!

[nmoore601]

Oops sorry about the name mix ip. I really appreciate you explaining that. I'm sure I will have more questions pertaining to photography.

[Brionuhh]

What type of camera are you using? If you are using an auto setting, you probably aren't going to really get the colors perfect. If you are using a light, you can try and auto white balance, which may help a bit. I just took a few of my hypo avalanche Tyras, who is tough to get the colors true. I used a white balance for the type of light I was using, and was shooting in manual mode with my DSLR.

[Bartholomew]

Yeah, knowing what camera you're using would help us a bit. Or me at least.
Using an automatic setting will sometimes wash out the pictures, and not give you the right colors.

You'd need to mess around with the shutter speed, aperture, and I always keep my ISO at 800. (Although increasing ISO adds exposure to the picture, increasing ISO any higher also adds grain to the picture, and nobody likes grain).
Get back to us on what camera you use, and maybe I'll be able to help you out a bit more!