Newt photography

[Daniel Kane]

Hi,

The other day I was outside and noticed a female palmate newt at the surface of the garden pond. Of course, being interested, I wanted to see if there were any more of these in the pond, and since yesterday I've seen a few. I always wanted to try underwater photography, so using a plastic tank I bought a few years ago I set up am mini-habitat for two of these newts and tried my first newt photography:

Now I'm wondering what can I do to improve these photos? I find it hard to get a full-body shot of either. I've got the tank outside with a lid on, gravel bottom and one of those plastic sheets with a photo of vegetation on behind the tank to try and get a bit of ''naturalness'' into it. How have any other members gone about photography like this?

Cheers

[Mario Schweiger]

Hello,

first, you should use a glass aquarium instead of a plastic container. So you do not have the scatches!
We use a glass cuvette 25 x 10 x 20 (L x W x H) made of 6 mm glass.
Nothing on top, so the light may come from above.
Remove all the small air bulbs inside and clean the outer surface carefully from waterdrops.
And you should use no flash and have a polarising filter on your camera.

Triturus macedonicus; everything made wrong. Photo: Mario Schweiger

Triturus pygmaeus; everything ok (nearly). Photo: Christoph Riegler, www.herpetofauna.at

Mario

[Aviad Bar]

Interesting;
I will try this technique.
The males of the Triturus vittatus that we have in Israel are very impressive during the mating season but till now I did not manage to get good photos (on the ground out of the water, they look very bad).

Triturus vittatus