Scaly residents of Philadelphia Zoo

Lest I forget the lowly denizens of Philadelphia Zoo, here are pictures of a couple of them. Forgive my ignorance but I only know these as snakes and big lizards.

[Edit: I may be mistaken but I think the large lizards are the chuckwallas.]

Unfortunately the lighting in the reptile house was very dim so my lens was kept wide open and that made for very shallow DOF in these pictures.

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they are ptetty good Leo. what lens did you use? i usually take the 100 2.8, and shoot 800 ISO. a tripod makes life easier, as the shutter speeds i get are about 1/20th. i try to keep the aperature at 5.6-8.0. handheld gets pretty tough down there. i'll post some tonite, if i got any keepers!

eric1 wrote:
they are ptetty good Leo. what lens did you use? i usually take the 100 2.8, and shoot 800 ISO. a tripod makes life easier, as the shutter speeds i get are about 1/20th. i try to keep the aperature at 5.6-8.0. handheld gets pretty tough down there. i'll post some tonite, if i got any keepers!

These were all shot with the 70-200 f2.8 IS L with the 1.4x TC at ISO 800. The top two were shot at 1/60 f/4 while the last was shot at 1/30 f/4.

The problem with shooting with a slow shutter speed is that even with a tripod, you can't prevent blurs caused by the animal moving around. I had a couple of pictures of other lizards, too, like the bug-eyed chameleon but they're all messed up because of motion blurs. Oh, well, I'm glad I was able to get at least a few that are half decent enough to post.

I'd say you did very well. The snake is great - especially at those settings.

Thanks, Scott.

Here's one of the bug-eyed lizards (a chameleon) I was talking about. The head of this lizard was a little blurred because it moved as I took the picture. I was able to sharpen it up a little using the High Pass filter just on the head. And sizing it down seemed to help a little, too. Now that I'm looking at it resized, it doesn't look too bad, I guess.

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