Pixiq

Magazine work can be tough.  Believe me I do plenty of it.  Assignment work, while as exotic as it seems, can be a challenge.  Often I’m presented with challenges that range from creatively lighting in the field to catching up with wary subjects.

I tell people that on a magazine shoot, the real work happens before the shoot.  Here’s why:

Pre-production:

Of course every shoot begins with a call from a magazine.  I work for a lot of different publications and each one works differently.  Some will come up with an extensive shot list in which I work  collaboratively with a photo editor or creative director.  Others (most) will just say, “Get me some shots of ...”

When either situation arises, it is imperative upon me to do my research.

For this shoot, I was given the instructions to photograph a diminutive subject - the desert sand lizard (DSL).

What’s the big deal?

I know, the thought of shooting pictures of a desert sand lizard doesn’t sound all that sexy but believe me, it is an important subject.  The small lizard is petitioned to be listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species legislation. If the listing occurs, it could potentially curtail oil and gas exploration activities in the area of Texas and New Mexico where the lizards are found.  Therefore, it is imperative for people on both sides of this issue to do what they can to keep the economic engine of drilling and pumping  running while maintaining sand lizard habitat.

The Challenges

When approaching a shoot like this, I often make a list of the challenges I’ll face.  For this piece I knew that I’d have to:

Find a lizard to photograph;

1. Find someone who knows the habits and habitat of the lizard so we can accomplish number one;
2. Come up with a way to photograph a lizard that probably just wants to go about its lizard business and not stand still for a photo.

For number one, I knew the area in which the reptile lives.  In western Texas and Eastern New Mexico, broad sand dunes run south to north through the Permian Basin region.  These sand dunes are held in place by the diminutive sand shinoak and an array of prairie grasses.  Living in the dunes and burrowing tiny tunnels are the four to five inch long desert sand lizard.

At first, I’d never seen a DSL in person.  My only glimpse of one is what I found on-line through a Google search.  Therefore, I knew that securing permission to explore private property and then finding a lizard would be like finding a needle in a hay stack.  To compound the problem, I was on a budget with the magazine so I didn’t have the luxury of spending weeks in the field for half a dozen images.

Therefore, to solve problem number two, I got on the phone and started calling my network of wildlife biologists with whom I’ve made contact in the past.  After a half dozen or so calls, I found the name of a graduate student who was studying the lizard for his doctoral thesis.

A few e-mails and phone calls later, he’d agreed to take me afield but it took nearly six weeks for us to coordinate our schedules.  When we finally met in mid-September, he only had a few days left in the field and said that the adult lizards would be hard to find.

Not having any choice, I said that we’d have to take our chances on finding one.

In the Field

I left my house at 5am and headed southwest to the tiny village of Maljamar, New Mexico.  Seven hours later, I arrived and met my contact on the ranch where he and his two research associates were checking pitfall traps.  Pitfall traps are plastic buckets placed in the ground and are used for catching lizards once they fall in the buckets.

All summer long, they’d caught and measured and tagged lizards for their study which included monitoring the health and well being of the lizard in the critical habitat in which they lived. 

This morning, I got lucky.  My contact had caught two lizards and he was saving them for me to photograph before he turned them loose.

The Shoot

Shooting small mammals and reptiles is easy if you understand how to do it.  For this shoot, I decided to employ my $10, 10-gallon fish tank that I bought from Petco.  It works wonders for shoots like this.

The set-up is simple:

Add soil and vegetation that matches the surrounding terrain and put the animal inside.  Once the critter figures out that they have barriers, they’ll often settle in and pose nicely for images.

To light the lizard, I used single strobe shot through a translucent scrim and lit from above to cast the shadows below the lizard and make the light source seem more believable.  Therefore, the final shots ended up being a mix of ambient light that filtered in from the sides of the tank and a fill light from above to add a pop of color.

Metering was based on the ambient light and the flash used TTL to decide the appropriate amount of fill.

Ten minutes later the lizard shoot was over and the reptiles were turned loose - none worse for wear.  Six weeks of prep time and coordination all paid off on this brief shoot.  

It actually took me more time to walk from my vehicle to the research site than it did to shoot the pictures.

While I was there, I rounded out my shoot with images of the researchers at work and pictures of the habitat where the lizards live.

About an hour after I arrived, I was back on the road.  Another successful shoot behind me.

The Takeaway

The lesson here is that for assignment shoots, the more prep work you can do the better.  In a perfect world, even the most complicated shoots can go smoothly and efficiently.  By managing all of the variables that I could, I made the least manageable aspects (whether or not we would find a a lizard) workable.