April Showers Bring…?

April Showers Bring Wet Lizards, Oistins

Well, in this particular case, an April shower brought a chance for closeup photos of a wet (and perhaps somewhat grumpy) reptile. My wife and I were vacationing in the Caribbean island of Barbados, and having a wonderful time. Naturally, as I saw the colorful Barbados Anole lizards scampering around various places during our stay, I thought to myself that it would be cool to get some closeup photos of one of them. But they were pretty active and skittish, and realistically I didn’t expect to get a good photo op, especially considering the particular camera gear I had along. It wasn’t until a late morning cloudburst made everybody duck under some cover that I found this character sheltering among some broad leaves right by our hotel balcony, waiting out the rain as my wife & I were doing also.

It would have been easy to be a grump, myself, thinking about everything we could be doing if the weather hadn’t turned bad. Or to read a book and drink some tropical concoction. (Which, fair enough, I did plenty of other times during the trip.) But mindful of my chance to get a closeup, I pulled out the Pentax 645D with FA* 300mm telephoto lens and extension tubes, and went to work.

A small pocket LED flash gave just a hint of light to the subject under the otherwise diffused, neutral light of the heavily overcast sky. Shooting the lens wide open at f/4 and dialing in ISO 1600 was only sufficient to get the shutter speed to 1/100s — still relatively slow, but fast enough to deliver a number of decently crisp images with the camera secure on a tripod. A fun way to pass some time on a rainy day…