One day of my Costa Rica photo tours include a frog and reptile shoot. All of the species we photograph are native to this country, and all of them are beautiful and exotic. Sometimes we use natural backgrounds and other times I like to use solid black because it offers such a stark, dramatic contrast to the colorful subjects. Some of the subjects are nocturnal so a black background is appropriate. We shoot the animals outdoors on a covered terrace, and when there is a thick cloud cover it gets quite dark. I don’t like on-camera flash with wildlife because it looks unnatural, so the only option is to raise the ISO or use a tripod. If the subject moves a lot, though, a tripod is inhibiting. It’s essential that the shutter speed is fast enough and, at the same time, there must be enough depth of field to show the beautiful detail in the relatively small subjects. As I’ve mentioned before, I feel comfortable with much higher ISO settings now because Neat Image software does such a great job in mitigating the noise. The snake you see here is a green palm pit viper, and my settings were 1/320, f/18, 10,000 ISO, and I used a 100-400mm lens with an extension tube.
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