Friday, July 31, 2009

Some kind of turtle

Most mornings I walk our 3 dogs at our subdivision retention pond, right next to Clear Creek, and we have many turtles that live in the pond. Every spring I see the females laying their eggs near the woods, or in this case near the entrance in someone's flowerbed. I try to remember the area so I can check back to see if any eggs have hatched but usually cannot remember the exact spot. When I was working on the Selective Focus assignment I tried to take an interesting shot of one of the females as she returned to the pond but she was not very cooperative and this was the best I got. Our neighbors call these "snapping turtles" but when I looked that up I do not agree that these are that kind of turtle. Maybe a box turtle, but none of the pictures I found looked right either. I finally managed to note an exact spot where I saw a female laying eggs and returned for several days to check and on the 3rd or 4th day found the hole excavated and small rolled-up rubbery white eggshells so I thought the babies must have hatched already. However, reading one site it said that the eggs don't hatch for 9 to 13 weeks! Maybe a raccoon or some other critter had found the eggs.

Nikon D200, 60mm macro lens at f3.5 and 1/1600, ISO 320, sunny whitebalance

Post processing: increased blacks, vibrance and clarity in ACR, in Photoshop ran Punch Drunk action by Kubota at 20% opacity, sharpened with the highpass filter.



3 comments:

  1. Cool shot Cindi! Great use of selective focus!

    If you ever work on this capture agian you might try cropping away some of the foreground and see how it looks in a pano format. It seems a little heavy on the bottom to me.

    Cheers!
    Barry

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  2. I agree with Barry about the foreground--it does take away from the main subject somewhat.

    What would you think of a crop that would only show his/her head sticking out of the grass?

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  3. I have never seen a pond turtle lay eggs. I believe that you have pegged the middle ground with the foregound and backgound out of focus. And you were willing to get down on the ground to take the shot. Hard work is always rewarded in the long run.

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