This is my second attempt, I tried to post these shots before but something went wrong, the post never finished, it seemed like I lost contact with the TMIP servers. So here I go again. After the dolphin and orca pictures that Roger posted, I figured I'd go to the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago, and take some fresh dolphin pictures of my own to post. Unfortunately the dolphin area seemed to have been designed to be as unfriendly to photographers as possible. Imagine the scene. You're sitting down, facing the dolphin pool, and beyond the pool you see a perfect panoramic view of Lake Michigan. The area is entirely indoors, but the back wall of the area is all glass. Yes, it's very pretty, I found myself taking occasional shots of sailboats on the lake. But imagine the effects of all that sunlight reflecting off the lake and into the building, fiercely back lighting the scene. The roof of the area is almost completely solid, with artifcial lighting that can't hope to match the reflected sunlight filling in the scene. The end result is that most of my shots ended up looking almost like silhouettes. So I won't be posting any dolphin shots. And I tend to be unforgiving of the aquarium shots I take, they all seem to suffer from extreme CA (chromatic aberration, the effect of glass bending different colors of light different amounts, the end result is that objects have visible halos, red on one side and blue on the other). Yet I ended up with about 3.5 gigabytes of shots. To put that into perspective for my history, the most I've ever taken on an entire Disney World trip is about the same size. The difference is that I shot a lot of RAW files this time. At first it was an accident, I had set the camera to RAW for a certain situation and forgot to change back to Jpeg. So at some point I figured I'd keep on shooting RAW, I was getting a lot of really good looking scenes, I wanted to get the best possible quality images from them. The Shedd Aquarium has a special temporary lizard exhibit. The star of the exhibit is the Komodo Dragon that I've already posted an image of, my 10,000th shot on my 30D. But I was far more taken with the other lizards. I can't deny that Komodos are big and powerful, but they're kind of blandly colored. To start off with my collection of the other lizards we have an image that I call "The last thing an Apple Snail sees". That's a Cayman Lizard, apparently that species is well adapted to eat snails, they feed them Apple Snails in the Aquarium. I'm told their jaws are strong enough that they can crush the shells in their mouths. Next up, a simple bullfrog. So sue me, I like frogs. When I was a kid I was kind of uneasy around wildlife, I was scared of being bitten. But frogs were always such a safe animal. No real teeth to speak of, no venom (not our domestic frogs, anyway), they were soft, if slimy. Ages ago I once caught a tadpole and kept it in an aquarium tank. After a year it hadn't changed and in frustration I let it go. I've later learned that bullfrog tadpoles can take over a year to change into frogs. Next is a Crocodile Monitor, a lizard said to grow to potentially be longer than a Komodo, but still not as heavy. I found this creature much more appealing. The yellow on black coloration was quite nice. Although it wrought havoc with my auto white balance, the color balance on many of the Crocodile Monitor shots was way off. Chalk up another credit to RAW shooting, it was easy to change the balance, I just had to point photoshop to a reasonably white portion of the background rock work. I still don't think I got it right.. but my ability to adjust color balance is not too good. For me, the star of the whole museum was a panther chameleon. This was a wonderfully colored lizard that really worked with me. I had to choose between using my 70-200, which was probably higher quality but also had a much longer minimum focus range. The end result is that if the lizards were close to the glass wall of the aquariums, my 28-75 would allow me to get more magnification on the animals. Basically I had to be able to get close, but if I could the image would look closer as well. The Panther Chameleon was moving all over, and wasn't shy about coming right up to the glass. I love lizards, I really do. They're so good to me. I have a long and happy history of them cooperating with me when I'm trying to photograph them. There was a Blue Iguana in DC that gave me exactly the pose that I wanted, a cousin of mine had a Gecko that gave me the cutest pose I could have asked for.. here I got all sorts of angles on the Panther Chameleon. It had recently molted and still had some loose skin around its hind legs, so I tried to focus on the front half of the body. I have one difficulty with this critter. I don't remember just how brightly colored it really was. After staring at the image files for so long I don't remember what it looked like in reality. It was brightly colored, but I'm always tempted to crank up the color saturation more. While these lizards are capable of being quite brightly colored, I just don't remember just how bright this particular individual was. I kept coming back to take more pictures of the chameleon. I spent all day at the aquarium, and although I wandered all over I kept coming back to the lizard area to gawk at the chameleon. They're incredible creatures. Their toes have been fused into pincer-like arrangements, essentially the equivalent of the Vulcan "Live long and prosper" sign. The eyes are famous for being ugly yet amazing, with an independent arrangement that allows them to look in two different directions at once yet still allowing them to focus on a single target for depth perception that lets them hit a target insect with their long sticky tongues with amazing accuracy. They move with an almost alien manner, some swing back and forth as if they were leaves being swayed by the breeze. The thing that the Chameleon exhibit communicated to me was that their famous color changing ability really has little to do with camouflage. Although they still do tend to blend in with their background, despite the apparently outlandish color scheme. The color changing is really about communication. A female that is ready to breed will adopt bland colors. A pregnant female takes on a bright color scheme to warn off amorous males, to tell them that she's not interested. In a similar display, rival males take on bright color schemes if they're facing off against each other. The loser in the fight for dominance will mute his colors and skulk away. I just love them. I love the line of spikes they have on their stomachs and backs. They're this fantastic mix of alien and ugly, yet also beautiful and fantastic. In their native habitat they're wonderfully adapted. But they're having difficulty dealing with the encroachment of man upon their domain. The pet trade alone has endangered many of them. Yet it would appear that when treated properly they breed readily in captivity. I have some decent aquatic animal shots that should be worth posting, but I'm still sorting through them, trying to come to terms with the chromatic aberration. It doesn't help that some of the most high profile animals are in circular tanks, those are the worst for CA. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Your chameleon is a rather handsome fellow. You've captured not only the color but the textures of their skin. Great job!
boy they are colorful. I'm so used to our little brown anoles down here. Great depth of field in your shots.
