Aren't I Boootiful!

Image Critiques Wildlife Critiques
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We’ve been treated to a pair of large, no make that LARGE iguanas mating in our winter yard here in Florida. How large? One of our docks is 4’ wide, and laying across it at about a 30 degree diagonal the male has a little tail and a little nose hanging out in space at either end. The female can’t quite stretch so far, but laying straight across the dock nose and tail are touching the edges.

I’ll post some pics later for verification, but believe it or not he’s nowhere near as orange as he’ll be when the female finally consents to another mating. It’s as though he has to really impress her with the orange before the games can resume. After each mating he fades fairly quickly back to this coloration till the process starts over.

787male
787male2000×1333 489 KB

What technical feedback would you like if any?

The backlighting was terrible from this angle and I left it to the camera on P setting to make the decisions. Any suggestions on processing? Or do I just let it go as it is? I’m pretty impressed with how capably the camera (Nikon D7200) dealt with exposure.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

I’ve cropped this to eliminate a lot of featureless tapering tail. There’s so much beyond the left of frame that including it pushes the bulk and head far against the right side, or forces you to back way off in your framing. Do you miss that featureless tapering whip of a tail?

Any pertinent technical details:

Nikon D7200, Nikon 200-500 @ 500 w/ 1.4TC, hand held.

You may only download this image to demonstrate post-processing techniques.
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He really is quite impressive. I don’t miss the rest of the tail. I might even be tempted to taken even more to move his head closer to the thirds. I do agree the exposure is great and having him posed like that on the rocks as opposed to flat on the ground is nice.

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Thanks for the useful feedback Terri. In spite of (or because of) the incredible detail in these things they have lots of photo potential. But due to their loooong forms, they’re a photo challenge. I found one solution wherein the tail was curled back parallel to the body, but the photos s otherwise flawed. And they don’t spend much time with their tails curled!

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