Wildlife Photography Tips 9 - Wildlife at Home

Woohoo, the holiday season is all about us. I am in constant flux with entertaining guests, performing chores and running around performing "Honey Do's". But this season I have been able to incorporate a bit of wildlife shooting in the mix of things. Well, at least critter shooting anyway. One of my tasks has been to resurface the floor at our vet clinic. I was working on resurfacing the floor when I realised that the resident clinic critters had to be relocated to keep them out of harms way with the fumes from the floor drying.The good thing is...I had to bring some of the resident critters home while the floor cures...hence, wildlife photography!!!

Our resident gecko "client greeter" from our lobby presented me with the perfect victim and model. I snagged a couple of flash units and slapped on the Nikon 105macro lens, and began capturing a few shots. I really wasn't too concerned with shooting through the glass at the time, as it was better than running around the great room with a net, attempting to capture the gecko, had I opened the door and released it in our house.

It wasn't until I brought the images into post,(see above) that made it obvious...I should have cleaned the glass. As you can witness in the first image, the flash increased the visibility of the mineralizing of the water on the surface of the glass, not to mention the damaged scales on the lizard's head and other unwanted background objects.. But what is photography without the digital darkroom to explore and conquer your mistakes!

When bringing up the image in the On1 Photo Suite, I used the content aware brush to remove and repare broken scales and mineralization on the glass surface. I switched to the Effects module, also in the On1 suite, and darken the background and enhance some of the clarity and colors of the reptile before saving and exporting for this article.

As you can see, it isn't "running around in the wild" type of wildlife photography, but it made a busy week more enjoyable for me because I was able to capture wildlife, and still be the "home body" I was suppose to be.

Here's wishing you a great New Year a couple of hours early, and be sure to search for those criiters that may be wandering in the and around the house. Be careful about cleaning the glass first though...