This is a marine iguana from the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. I took this in 1995 when I was still shooting film. The black reptile on black lava would give a reflected meter, like the ones built into our digital cameras, a problem. In those days, though, I used a hand held light meter on incident mode, and they are extremely accurate even in contrasty light and even when shooting subjects that are all black or all white. These types of meters read the light falling onto the scene, not the light being reflected from it. You really had to know what you were doing in terms of exposure because you couldn't see the results until the film was developed back home. In those days, I always used a tripod. With animals like reptiles that warm themselves in the morning sun, that's not a problem because these creatures remain perfectly motionless. I remember using a 350mm telephoto, equivalent to a 200mm lens in the full frame digital format. The settings were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/250 and f/8, and I used Fujichrome Provia 100 slide film.
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