At the frog and reptile workshop today, among the many fascinating creatures we had to photograph was this panther chameleon. The pattern of color was quite unusual. Instead of replacing the black back ground with a shot of out of focus foliage, as I often do, I left it black so the design on the reptile looked especially bold and dramatic. My settings for this were 1/160, f/32, 400 ISO, and I used a 50mm macro lens with a Canon ring flash. My Canon 1Dx Mark II was set to manual exposure mode while the flash was set to ETTL. That's how the exposure turned out to be correct -- because the automatic exposure function of the flash was initiated with the ETTL setting. The background is black because the light fall-off behind the reptile occurs very quickly when the ring flash is placed so close to the subject.
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