Notes from the field :

These are the infamous marine iguanas of the Galápagos Islands. This particular island in the chain is called Santiago. What is interesting here is that all of the iguanas are positioned in the same direction - towards the sun, and ultimately towards the sea where they will feed once their body temperatures have risen.

This image is probably just OK photographically. As you can read in our Galapagos Trip Report, we had no choice over times of the day to photograph. Therefore, if you had harsh light, you had to deal with it. No flash was allowed to brighten up some of the shadow areas. The image was kept anyway because of the low angle view and the orientation of these reptiles. Sometimes you just have to shoot, have fun, and run with it!

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About the subject :

Marine Iguanas are only found in the Galápagos Islands and the only marine lizard in the world. They typically feed on algae on rocks and barnacles at the shore and underwater.

Due to the cold waters that flow through the islands, they require "warming up" after a swim to eat. So you will see this is one of their typical postures - head pointed up soaking in those rays.

The iguanas discharge salt water through their nostrils, which is why you see many of them with white encrustation on their noses.

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Technical details :

This image was made using a Nikon F5 and a Tokina 20-35 f2.8 lens with Fuji Provia 100F slide film. A tripod was slowly "scooted" towards the iguanas in an attempt to fill the frame with them. These animals were quite approachable, the closest iguana was probably 3 feet from the front of the lens.

As mentioned, no flash was allowed on the island, so you had to take the light conditions as is and work fast as the rest of the group was moving on. Provia F100 is a pretty good film for handling these very contrasty conditions. The slide was scanned using a Polaroid SS4000 filmscanner at 4000 dpi, and then resized to 72 dpi for web display.

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About the composition :

1] In general, there is probably more about this shot that I don't like over what I do. As mentioned in the description, difficult lighting conditions to work with. Looking at this, I think I would like it better with a more "head on" view of the iguanas, which a slight camera position shift to the left might have done.

2] The main reason I took this shot was to show how all of the iguanas were facing the same direction towards the sun - an important part of their behavior.

3] Lying on the sand, a wide angle lens was used to get very close. The focusing distance of the w/a zoom kept me from getting too close. A fixed 20mm lens in this case was probably the more appropriate choice. But when you are being rushed to move on, it is easy to forget all of these things in the field.

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