Mike Powell

I don’t really expect to see snakes in mid-November. Surely they are all holed-up somewhere, waiting for spring to come.

Last week, however, when I was concluding a successful search for a Great Spreadwing damselfly with fellow odonate enthusiast Walter Sanford, I spotted portions of the body of an Eastern Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) as it slithered in an out of the fallen leaves that covered the path on which we were walking. Then we spotted a second one and a third.

I felt a little like Indiana Jones in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, when he dropped his torch into the well and saw that the floor below was covered with slithering snakes. “Why did it have to be snakes?” For all I knew, we might have been standing in the midst of a massive colony of snakes.

Unlike Indiana Jones, though, I don’t suffer from a fear of snakes, so the first thought that came to my mind was figuring out how to get some shots of the snakes. Walter and I got a good look at the third snake, which froze in place for an extended period of time.

I had my Tamron 180mm macro lens on my camera, so I knew that there was no way that I was going to capture a shot of the entire body of the snake. My initial shots were taken from above, looking down at the snake. I like the way that I was able to capture a glimpse of both eyes and a sense of the environment, filled with fallen foliage.

I really wanted to isolate the snake better, so I decided to move to the side a bit and closer to the snake. I tried to focus on breathing slowly in order to steady my camera better as the snake grew larger and larger in my viewfinder. I got a shot that looks like a kind of autumn still life.

Most people might have figured that there was no need to get any closer, but I decided I wanted to try to get a side view of the snake. So I moved in even closer, knowing that the closer I got, the harder it was going to be to get a shot in focus as the depth of field grew increasingly more shallow. The photo below is not cropped at all and gives you an idea how low to the ground I was when I took the shot. I know that I am really close when I get a really good reflection in the snake’s eye.

I have commented several times before about my bodily contortions when getting shots like this and how happy I am that nobody was around to document them. In this case, though, Walter photographed me as I was getting the last shot.

If you want to see his shot of me (and, more importantly, his take on the snake), be sure to check out Walter’s blog posting. As a bonus, you’ll also learn more about how snakes brumate during the winter—they don’t actually hibernate.

I highly recommend shooting the same subject periodically with another photographer and comparing results. It’s fascinating and instructive to get a sense of how a single situation can be interpreted and how each photographer makes a whole series of creative choices that result in very different images.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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