Today's #LizardReport is a little different because I am on a road trip. Camped out at Kelso Dunes and spent the morning herping in Mojave National Preserve.
7 species of lizard, 4 of them "life lizards"! Here's the first, Phrynosoma platyrhinos, a horned lizard. Look at that camo! They're sooo cute!
(It's intermission at a live theater performance, so I'll post more later or tomorrow in this thread.)
Another "life lizard" from my day #herping near Kelso Dunes, Mojave National Preserve. Long nosed leopard lizard. It sat there letting me photograph it for a while, then got bored and disappeared into a hole.
I also saw a tiger whiptail, zebra tailed lizard and lots of desert iguanas. I don't feel bad about not getting good photos of any of these, because there are tame individuals of these species in my yard in Arizona 😆
Edit: looks like the whiptail is a Great Basin whiptail, Aspidoscelis tigris tigris according to CaliforniaHerps.com, as opposed to what Tucson Herpetological Society calls tiger whiptail, Aspidoscelis tigris. 🤔
This is the first time I've ever seen zebra-tails or desert iguanas outside of town, where I guess they must be a little more used to people. These ones would bolt full sprint 50 to 100 feet away from me. The ones in town are highly skittish, but you can generally get a little bit closer to them.
If you want to see pictures of these species, just look back at the #s in my profile.
Based on californiaherps.com, I believe this is the Western side-blotched lizard, Uta stansburiana elegans.
Saw several of these in the rocks where I found the chuckwalla, Mojave National Preserve.
While I have seen side-blotched lizards before in the lower Sonoran desert, I think they may be a different sub species than this one from the Mojave desert.
The nice thing about being a beginner herper is that virtually anywhere I go, I can find lizards I've either never seen before or that I hadn't previously put in the effort to ID.
That was my 200 mm f2.8. I'd have to go back and look at metadata, but it was fairly bright out so I may have upped the iso to 200 and shot it at f5.6, giving a little more depth of field. Part of the trick is having the lizard's body relatively parallel to the front of the camera/lens elements, so most of it is in the focused area. I was also very low to the ground, so that's part of the reason the foreground and background fade so hard. I concentrated on getting its face/eye in focus.
Oh, and, for the record, while I didn't do this, one way to get that extreme deprh of field fall off is to digitally blur the foreground and background in post production. This shot just worked out that way because of the factors I listed above, but a lot of times when you see shots like that, the blurring is intentionally added to keep the focus on the subject.
@Mikal ahhh yeah I have tried using tiltshift blur and such for the effect, but doing it in post always looks fake. TBH a lot of times it looks fake, but because of the folliage variation in this one it keeps the realistic look which is why I figured this one was achieved on-camera. I'm mostly a fan of on-camera effects. Same sort of thing I try to do for some dog photography, but theyre so large keeping even the entire head in focus is rough it feels like! hence feeling like there is a trick I am missing. I think the length helps...my longest nice prime is a 100mm, a 200 or 300 would I think achieve the effect better.
I get images like your first one a lot, but ones like the second are much harder! But I like :) :D
With something like that, shooting with a slightly longer lens completely wide open, with the subject a little closer will help. If I really want to isolate focus, and I can use a short telephone photo, I have an 85 mm f1.2 that has an extremely, at times almost unusably shallow depth of field if the subject is somewhat close up.
My camera shoots fascists
Sunguramy 