Grass Snake

 

Grass Snake

 

The other day, Lynda Robinson rang me up to ask if I had any shots of Grass Snake ? I replied that I had on `slide` but none on `digital`. I asked why, and she told me that one of her cats had just bought one indoors ! I knew it had to be a juvenile because a cat could not have managed a full grown one. She said that it was unmarked, and that they had put it in a bucket, and that if I wanted to photograph it I had better come around to collect it. It was in fact quite a small one so, I took it down to the woods near the Roman River Valley and placed it carefully on a nice mossy bank.

 

 

The above shot was taken with a Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 100m Macro lens, ISO 2500, and 15th sec at F11. The available light was not good but I still needed F11 to get a degree of depth of field to the shot. This is why I shot it at such a high ISO.  Focusing manually on the snakes head, I could just about hand hold it at 15th sec. (No IS on this lens)  Although there was slight`noise` to the images, the noise reduction in Lightroom works very well. Fortunately, the `noise` on a 5D Mark III is pretty good even at quite high ISO settings.

The shot below was the same camera setting but had a burst of `fill in flash` set at minus 1 2/3rd of a stop in exposure. The grass snake was released after its `modelling session` in an area were I know grass snakes are seen.