Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi e3veryone I have always liked going out and taking pictures of herps but it seems none of my pictures ever come out good. Eather the herp is to far away to make out or when I try to get closer they run off. I would like to buy a better camera but the wife wont let me sence I recently spent a small fortune on the one I have now. It is a Canon Powershot A300 5.1X zoom and 3.2 Mega Pixels. Any pointers on how to get some good shots with this camera? sence I dont have a billion MB in extra flash cards I keep it set at 1024x768 "normal" I can change it to 2048x1536 will that help at all? at 16mb at that seting with super fine instead of normal it only gives me 9 pictures. I usualy take about 100-200 pictures on every trip and only have 128megs of flash cards. Any help will be greatly apreciated
My reptile collection and research

Lizards are always a pain to shoot. Move slowly and keep trying. For some reason, it seems to help when you make slow concentric circles without looking them in the eye to get closer to them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, you just have to catch them, place them under a can or something, pre-focus, lift the can and get a quick shot. Snakes are quite=a-bit easier, just walk up and start shooting or catch them, move them to another spot for better photographing. A container placed over them allowing you time to pre-focus helps with jumpy snakes too. The camera you have should do fine, for your website, a medium setting should do fine too. If when you post them, they look too big, just resize in a post processing program like photoimpact, photoshop, etc. Half the fun is learning, just shoot pictures till your finger is sore, make adjustments from different angles, try different tricks and the good ones will come.
This one took me forever, catching him, putting him back, catching him, putting him back and several photos to get just one decent shot. He was on the side of my house in a bush. He won't even let me get close now. I guess he modeling days bring back bad memories.

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Snakes of Hudspeth County, Texas

Ok thanks for the tips I will give them a try. I am going on a 2 day trip to do some research in the forest this coming week so that will be a good time to try them. The link below is a link to my group were I have posted some of the pictures I have taken in the past year or 2. They are realy the only pictures that came out half way good.
Photos