Most Unexpected

Why won't my snake eat???
She's been extremely active lately, as in climbing and cruising all around her tank 24-7 for weeks. You would think all that exercise burns enough calories to make a snake powerful hungry, but there are two mice living in our garage that prove otherwise.

When the timer tripped and lit up her tank the other day, I looked over my shoulder and it took me quite awhile to process what I was seeing:
Snake eggs!
And smaller orange not snake eggs...



Poor girl was exhausted from pushing them out and didn't move a muscle for over 24 hours. Yesterday I was able to harvest them, and clean 'em up for a portrait:


After Googling for a few minutes I found out that it's normal for a captive female corn snake (and other species) to lay eggs and "slugs" without ever coming into contact with a suitable male during breeding season.
Last year at this time Candy was just as active and uninterested in food but didn't push out any weird stuff, although I suspected that her behavior was mating related. She was already an adult when I found her 5 years ago so it's odd that all of a sudden this stuff happens.



Over the next year I might try to find someone local with a suitable male who's interested in breeding. Hopefully I can find a male with normal corn snake colors, since the plethora of selective-bred fancy colors don't interest me as much--Candy being the exception because she's mine and oh so sweet.
I once built an incubator on the fly with stuff laying around the house when a lizard someone gave me dumped a clutch of eggs, and successfully hatched a half dozen babies 2 months later. No reason I couldn't do it again but much better with minimal investment.


When I get the time for dissection, we'll see if there's anything inside these eggs and slugs worth seeing.

Flash Modifiers

This is what I've been doing lately, besides yardwork

Last week I built a new grid for my main flash.
My last one was a great first attempt, but over time I found that the straws I had used to focus the flash into a smaller circle (instead of blasting the whole room) were too long, resulting in too much of a good thing by far. Full-choked light wasn't as useful sometimes, so I wanted a wider pattern.
I had my brother run it through his bandsaw to shorten the whole thing, and it pretty much exploded into tiny pieces all over the driveway. This was a surprise, since the same modification had worked fairly well on a grid for my smaller accent flashes.
I made a new one with 1/2" straws (vs 1") and it works much better for me. Also used balsa wood instead of frame mat-board since it's much easier to cut and sand, saving mucho time in construction. Balsa is fragile, but in this box form with all the straws filling space (and glued together) it's very strong, yet light.


I used the grid to light the main petunia and a minimum of surrounding foliage:
I like it when the light starts to dim just outside of the main subject, so surrounding items don't compete for attention. Grids are great for that.
In this case, after a few exposures I added my other two accent flashes to the foliage and white blooms to add some spice.



After that project got me back where I was before, I jumped right into the next one.

A softbox is a light modifier that, much like using a white umbrella with your flash, spreads the light out and therefore softens it. Shadows have less of a hard edge to them. Like the difference between direct sunlight and overcast.
Unlike umbrellas, there isn't any stray light spilling into the rest of your "studio", and they are also easier to get into difficult angles like straight up or down.
I started by going through my stockpile of old microphone stands and booms and came up with the perfect setup.
Then I found a sheet of new black foamcore for a dollar.
Cutcutcut, glueglueglue.
(Using a self-healing cutting mat really helps--Thanks Lisa!)

The inside walls are reflective (using foil) and for now I have some material from a white linen napkin to spread the light:
As with all of my DIY light modifiers, this has a good friction-fit when mounted to the flash.
No velcro or rubber bands for me, if I can help it.


Finally found some feeder mice locally today, so Candy got to come out of her habitat and socialize before dinner:
The softbox was around 15" away, and you can hopefully see how all of the "specular highlights" ( = relections of the light source) are long and smooth instead of being pinpoints of over-bright ugliness like you can get with bare naked flash.

I used a 2nd flash unit behind a blue gel to hit the wall behind this scene, and appreciated the quick artistic freedom that small flashes can furnish when I decided to make the right side fade a bit darker.


Candy was her usual twisty/grabby/snakey self, so I ended up having to partially disassemble the 8-string bass's stand to pry her loose.
I should have been ready for this, since right before her last feeding she somehow managed to get Sylvia's car keys stuck on her tail.

Gotta Love Springtime

The weather's getting warmer--daytime highs in the '80s!
Plenty of stuff to do outside:
Planted a nice crop of jalapenos to hopefully make up for last year's pepper disaster. (No more experimenting with the lesser breeds).
And plenty of petunias to make Sylvia smile.
Trimming the trees and killing the dandelions.


And catching critters who've awakened after a long winter nap:
This is a Checkered Garter snake, and it's pretty much the only subspecies of Garter in the southwest USA and northern Mexico.
The ones most people are familiar with from up north are good at hiding in foliage and around water, but ours have to disappear in the rocks and dirt so the checkered pattern is a nice adaptation that explains why most folks have never seen one.
Always wanted a checkered for a pet but this guy was too wild and besides that, Sylvia said no.
He's already been released and with any luck will be scaring the dopers across the alley right about now.

Candy Is Dandy

Snakes won't eat when their skin is too tight, so after shedding last week I knew Candy would be hungry.
First, she has to earn her meal by posing for the "Chair Project".


This is (was) the 2nd mouse:



Sylvia latest medal, from today's Rock & Roll Marathon:
I would have gone, but didn't wake up until 1:23pm. Oops.
(I haven't slept well all week)
I'm very proud of her--she came home to a bouquet of flowers sold to me by a couple of surly emo "girls" who'll never get another dime from me.
Hey, try not to let your hatred of men interfere with commerce?

Friday Favorites #1

A new feature to help fight stagnation, "Friday Favorites" will showcase old photos from my archives that (in my opinion) still hold up after all these years.

A viper at the San Antonio Zoo, from Feb. 2005.

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.

Skull Candy

Just prior to feeding I asked Candy (our albino corn snake) to pose for me.

Two Notes For Next Time:
1) Make sure to set-up all the flash gear and backgrounds before taking the snake out of her tank!
One-handed set-up has been proven possible, but snakes have a tendency to wrap themselves around anything within reach, like light stands and cameras etc.
2) Don't ask a snake to stay where you put them when they're at a high body temp, like just before a feeding. I control her temperature and therefore activity level using dimmer-controlled lamps, and right before a feeding is the absolute worst time for taking pictures like this.
Like shooting hyper dogs or kids.

I had just taken her out of the tank when this photo popped into my head, so I accepted the challenge and went for it despite having only one free hand to place all the gear and make adjustments. Glad it worked.
I have a new respect for animal wranglers on photo and movie sets.

The reason for this shot was to have something new for Flickr and all my other outlets as well as for a new header on my BLISS band photoblog.