As usual, the images look great Chris !!
Walter
:crazy02:BOUT' CORNS !!
Thank you sir! BTW, I haven't forgotten about our previous emailings, but rather had a little bit of life happen.
Beautiful photos of beautiful snakes, Chris.
Thanks. I'm quite appreciative of those that have worked with me in allowing me to obtain said snakes.
Those photos are wonderful!! Can I ask, did you use the trick of putting a bowl over top of them and then removing it right before you took the photo? How'd you get them to stay put??
Ignoring the photo setup aspect, I had 2 thinks going for me. 1 - cloud cover/rain that aided somewhat in the appearance of the rocks and 2 - cool temps, and thus what little sunlight that was getting through the clouds equated to most snakes hunkering down on the rock. From there...
I use plastic flower pot overflows. It's hard to find them now (at least when I lived in NM and even out here in the Dallas-Ft Worth area), but they work great as a means for corralling critters for photos. Also work great as simplistic hides for terrestrial geckos.
This is my typical indoor "studio".
This outdoor session was in-line with:
- needing photos of 2014 hatchlings for classifieds
- not knowing where I can reliably go field herping in the north Dallas area
- not having $$$ to disappear down into west TX for some herping
- fiddling with my Nikon D300 since Nikon has yet to release a true successor to it or the D700.
Love the new background! Wonderful pictures. The setting makes the pewters colors look especially stellar.
It did seem to make her a little lavenderish/light purple.
I like them! The green looks good against the reddish snakes, and the butter stripe just glows. The caramel stripe looks kind of dull (maybe that's just what it looks like) and I think the pewter needs more contrast somewhere. But overall, very nice
Mrs. Butters, aka Chiquita, really popped with this rock and litchen setup. I do agree, the caramel stripe and additionally my caramel tesserae really came out dull against it though. The caramel stripe is kind of an anomaly though as since it's a hatchling colors just haven't really come through yet. I agree with the pewter too. She didn't really leap out like the others did. I think this is more of the rock color though. I had 2 colors, gray or red-tan, but my red-tan rocks are in use within 2 naturalistic habitats I have set up.
The other problem I had was my 18% neutral gray card I use for setting my white balance didn't seem to fair well with this shoot for some reason. The images kept turning a yellow- or orange-ish hue when I attempted to correct for accurate white balance. So I had to go old school route of setting it via setting the black, gray, and white points in each photo. Not an easy task when most of the shots kept calling for slightly overexposed points on the green-gray litchen as white. I need to hit up a couple landscape supply places around here to see what my rock options are for setting up a nice outdoor photo studio.
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