Slither Along To Cannington

If you want to see some venomous reptiles with aggressive attitudes but are tired of watching the current affairs segments on the television news...may I suggest that you visit the Cannington Exhibition Center on Albany Highway this Sunday. They are running a fabulous reptile exhibition all day.

Of course it is not all snakes - there will be lizards and frogs and newspaper journalists and everything. With a bit of luck you might find something cute and cuddly.

It won't be me, I hasten to add. I'm to give a little talk on photographing reptiles. Which will be an exercise in pure imagination ...errr...I mean careful scientific conjecture. I don't photograph reptiles. They don't photograph me. The closest we come is a brief nod across the room at a cocktail party.

I'm going to recommend two approaches - the careful/scientific and the joyous/artistic. In the one case I will be showing a Nikon DSLR equipped with a long macro lens and a flash on the end of a coiled cord. I will also advocate the use of a standardised colour card and image-correcting software so that the budding Darwin will be able to present the images with some accuracy.

The artistic will be with the new Nikon P7700 Coolpix, and an armful of construction paper. The former will render most close-up scenes beautifully and the latter will spice up the backdrops. The animals that need to be photographed from a distance - venomous ones - can also be captured pretty well with the camera and as it features the standard TTL hot shoe assembly the coiled cord and the SB 700 can also be brought into play.

Okay, folks, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, and I suspect I won't be telling the herpetologists anything THEY don't know, but at least I can help them to organise their outfits.

I wonder if they will applaud me or just hissssssss?

PS: The top image is Chelsea Bunz as a salamander...