Jazz Candy

Tonight I was just going about my business--learning songs for band practice on Thursday, cooking some pizza for us to eat during the Spurs game, surfing the interwaves, watering the brown grass, stuff like that.
Happened to notice that Candy (our albino corn snake) was cruising around her tank in 'hunting' mode and remembered that I had a mouse in the freezer, so I took the micicle out to thaw and forgot all about it.
The snake's actions eventually reminded me to check on the mouse's temperature and set-up the feeding tank.
Mere seconds before that process was too far along to interrupt, it occurred to me that snakes and electric basses might be a nice combination for photographic purposes.
A few months ago I already had a squirming handful of hungry slither before deciding to set-up lights and camera--what a mistake! You need two free hands.

What's interesting to me is how repeated usage of my lighting tools speeds-up the process.
Three or 4 minutes to place a white foamcore background on a rocking chair behind the bass, connect my main flash to it's radio-remote triggers and gel/grid/position the 2nd slave flash, aim them both using guesswork that turned out to be good, then add my newest light modifier--a white Chinese paper lantern globe from IKEA that Sylvia remembered I wanted.
We don't have any IKEA stores in SA, so it was a delightful surprise when she grabbed me one on the way home from her trip to Galveston.



This is how I shot it--as a vertical which represented the reality of a bass on it's stand + snake.


The beauty of having a bajillion pixels to work with lets you make desktop wallpapers of your favorite parts within an image.


But going back to how things first appeared onscreen, I kinda like this version.

It's still too early to decide where I'm going to go with this one.
Only spent 6 minutes shooting, and this exposure with both a good snake presentation and visible forked tongue was within the first two.

Good photography isn't supposed to be about how quickly you can set your shit up, it's about capturing what you intended.
But the reality is that when anything becomes a pain-in-the-ass to accomplish, you might be less likely to continue.
Right now, I'm jazzed by the fact that whenever I try something complicated like this it takes half as much time as the previous attempt.