I photographed this gila monster during my last Bats and Birds workshop in Arizona. We used the man-made pond to photograph bats on the wing at night, and in the day it made a natural environment for other animals including this impressive reptile. I used a 1.4x teleconverter on my 100-400mm Canon telephoto giving me 560mm of focal length. My group and I were in a blind built to take advantage of a water-level perspective. In order to capture the flickering tongue, I used 14 frames per second. Even at that speed, I missed many of the shots because the tongue moved in and out so fast. I took this picture around 11am and the sun was fairly harsh, but interestingly the lighting works here nicely. My settings were 1/3200 (to freeze the tongue action), f/11, and 1250 ISO.
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