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Today my long cherished dream came true, photographing snake in it’s habitat.
I believe many of the photographers will long to do it in vain, unless they are a expert in spotting and handling snakes. I strongly suggest everyone, do not try to handle or get any closer to snakes unless you have a snake experts along with you, who can guide and make sure that the situation is under control. The way I did, This Snake Walk event was arranged by the Chennai Trekking Club, we hired a Irula tribe from Chennai Crocodile bank to help us with this.

One actually needs quick reflex and patience to shoot a snake, I learnt this while shooting the Rat Snake. Rat snake is so agile that it will keeps moving its head to and fro and leave your camera lens keep hunting for the right focal length in AF mode. In this case its a good idea to shoot in Manual focus mode. This is a amazing candidate for photography beautiful color, pattens, long and importantly non venomous.

The tricky part is to get a sharp clear eyes. If you look at the photograph below, the eyes is in sharp focus but not clear due to the light reflections in it’s eyes, this considerably reduces the actual beauty of the snake. So it is important to concentrate on this aspect while shooting.

It’s always good to choose a shady place to shoot a snake, provided you have a choice it has multiple advantages, the foremost advantage is that snake being cold blooded will feel comfortable under shade rather than exposing it to direct sunlight, Snake’s scales will reflect considerable amount of light which might affect the exposure level of the photograph so a shady place will give you a even exposure.

To bring out the ultimate beauty of the snake while shooting a macro or closeup shot, a shallow DOF (Depth of field) is essential to make your photograph lively and imposes more priority to the subject.

Most important… have a purpose:

The ultimate objective should not be just to shoot beautiful photographs of snakes or any other animals, birds for that matter. But yes the aim should be to bring out the beauty of our environment and thus the biodiversity of our world. So that it imposes a strong liking and care by the people looking at it. Conservation should be the important objective for a wildlife photographer.