Astro Visual Photography

Composing wildlife can be challenging. Wildlife don’t often want their photos taken Quite often we are forced to shoot in the general direction and hope for the best. But now and then a creature, such as this little lizard, is happy to have a few moments in the spotlight.

OBJECTIVE:

I was in the rain-forest and simply looking for anything that caught my eye, and this little guy did. He was just coming out of his hole on the top side of a large, fallen tree. He saw me and froze. But, millimeter by millimeter, he slowly crept further out, showing more and more of his body. I decided right then that I needed to get this shot before he was right out to try to show his home habitat.

COMPOSITION:

I chose to take a fairly close up shot of the skink as I wanted to show his features as best as I could. As he was moving, albeit millimeter by millimeter, I thought leaving some active space in front of him would help to give the feel that he was headed in that direction. Hence the area in front of his head with little in it. Active space is an area in your photo that usually devoid of any major elements in order to help your main subject in some way. It might be clear track in front of a race car to show where it’s headed for instance.

SETUP & SETTINGS:

1/400th – f5.6 – ISO 400. 310mm focal length. No filters on the lens. Handheld. Centre weighted metering. On Camera Ext Flash.
I dialed back the flash here to give just enough light to light up the subject.

The darkness in the rain-forest made it necessary to bump up the ISO if I was going to hand hold a shot at a focal length of 310mm. I wanted the shutter speed up as fast as possible so I settled with 1/400 at f5.6. I figured the close up shot didn’t need too much depth of field and getting a sharp photo was more important to me.

POST PROCESSING:

Sharpening was the only adjustment.

END RESULT:

I’m happy with the result. We can see the features of the lizard quite clearly and the moss that surrounds his home. We can see that his back end is still in the hole. The wide aperture of f5.6 and the long focal length have created enough blur in the background so as not to be distracting.

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