Knight Anole

Any kind of zoo can be one difficult place to shoot photos; they are looking to both keep the animals happy, and keep the people walking through happy. They are not worried about lighting up the cages and exhibits so us photographers don't have to push our cameras into extremely high ISO and wide apertures to get a decent photo of the animals. And sadly, while a fairly good photo, this one does suffer from that very problem.

At first glance at the thumbnail, this photo caught my eye. The colors on here are spectacular, as well as the contrast. Granted the light on the head of the lizard is a bit blown out, but other than going on to HDR, there was no real way to solve this.

The composition is good as well, I like the bit of space in front of the animal; I don't like it when people crop it so the animal alone fits in frame, its too much for a photo. Granted the photo does look like it is cropped a bit vertically too, I don't know if that was for a reason, but a bid more dead space above the lizard wouldn't have hurt either.

The sharpness on the wood right under the lizards head is just beautiful, and for some reason is the part I stare at the most. And while the anole's eye and part of its head are in focus, not much else is. I honestly think more of the wood is in focus. Now a lot of that comes with the very wide aperture, which of course was needed seeing how high you had your ISO set. There isn't much you could do, other then trying to line up more of the lizards body (if possible) wit the focal plane, to get at least the side facing you more in focus.

Still the colors in this photo are phenomenal, and other than the blownout light on top of the anole's head, the lighting is just about perfect. The focus leaves a bit to be desired, but I'll blame that more on the zoo than you <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/w/w…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Wink)"/>