Paul D'Andrea Photography

Baby Reptiles at Eagle Creek

My daughters volunteer at Eagle Creek’s Earth Discovery Center, they go weekly to help clean cages and feed critters. I joined them today and got to hold a baby box turtle and baby black rat snakes. I even fed the baby snakes mouse tails (yeah, gross but still amazing to see).

I had my D600 with me, a hot shoe flash, and a 105 macro. I lucked out with ceilings that were low enough to bounce light from, and bumped up the ISO so the flash wouldn’t have to work as hard. The D600 has stellar ISO performance, so at 800 there is no noise at all (I pushed the feature image a bit further in Photoshop than the others, so it’s got some grain in the flat out of focus areas, the other images are amazingly clean).

Here’s a few from the afternoon:

The snakes wouldn’t just eat the tails, so we had to sort of roll the tail along the jaw to pry the mouth open, then push it (gently) in. Once begun the snakes worked away till the whole tail was gone.

 

 

Commercial photographer in Indianapolis, IN.