Weekend at Bernie’s

Despite what you’ve heard it turns out there some things you can touch with a ten foot pole.

It was a hot Saturday morning in Atlanta.  The kind of day you invite friends or relatives for a pool party.  A couple of hours before guests were to arrive my wife found me in the basement.  “Remember how you said you’d help get ready for the party.”  I replied in the affirmative.  “Well your first job is to get the snake out of the pool!” With clenched eyebrows all I could think was, “WTF?”

Most assuredly, there was a long serpentine reptile swimming around the perimeter of the pool.  I’m no expert but the banding pattern and flat angular head looked like the real deal, as in venomous.  In the blink of an eye I grabbed the long skimmer pole with the bag net at the end.  You know how sometimes you wonder how you’ll react in an adverse situation?  I’m still surprised that snake wrangler skills laid dormant in my grey matter. My brother was visiting and felt the need to speak on behalf of the endangered serpent.  “It might be a harmless look-alike specie. Why don’t you just catch and release it?”  Once I saw the snake open it’s mouth (wide) and strike aggressively at the net my mind was made up.  I know nature has a role for aquatically inclined pit vipers but I was equally certain it was not as a guest at our pool party.  I also wasn’t enamored at the prospect of returning this guy to the urban wilds which begin only footsteps from the edge of our patio.  This snake was going down, as to the bottom of the pool.  An adroit move or two later and the snake was caught in the net.  My wrangling skills don’t extend to handling live specimens so I simply let nature take it’s course at the bottom of the pool.

As imminent danger morphed into idle curiosity (the difference being the amount of adrenaline coursing through your body) I couldn’t help but be intrigued.  That’s the moment the idea took root.  A photograph.  Photographs.  Macro photographs.  A portrait of a cold blooded killer.  Yep, no way I wasn’t going there.

For the record:  THE SNAKE WAS DEAD IN THE PHOTOS.  YES, I KNOW EVEN A DEAD POISONOUS SNAKE CAN BE DANGEROUS.  YES, I WAS CAREFUL HANDLING IT.  And yes, even dead, handling a venomous snake is creepy and gave me pause.  But the operative word is pause.  That meant the length of time I could think about how I wanted to craft the photographs.

Then came the fang shots.

When you hold and pinch the head from behind the mouth naturally opens and with more pressure the fangs descend.  I made a quick setup in my home studio and held the snake with fingers just out of frame.  Then as I pinched with a little more pressure, venom was expressed.

That provoked additional thought, as in “Be damn careful.”  Then another thought crossed my mind and I found inspiration in the 1989 Hollywood release, “Weekend At Bernie’s”.  For those of you who missed that moment in cinema the premise is staging an entire weekend with a host who happens to have just died.  A minor inconvenience.   Taking a cue from this script, why not photograph the snake in natural surroundings.  There are possibilities that one could never capture with a live specimen.  If you think a two foot copperhead is creepy in your home studio, let me tell you that seeing the snake laid out in it’s natural habitat and then lying prone with a macro lens inches away feels very real.

My primary hope was that dead snakes don’t give off an odor that says to relatives, “Go check it out. Cousin Billy could be in trouble!”

Such is how the snake series evolved.  How was I to know that days later another creepy crawler would end up in my viewfinder?

My wife and I were returning from the Harry Potter movie about 11:00p.  As we approached the garage door she exclaimed, ”Look at the cool spider web!“  This was her idea.  I would never have even seen it, but once it was pointed out, backlit by the security light at the corner of our roof, how could I resist.  If you want to see a photographer move quickly say, ”Isn’t that back lighting great!“  I threw my D7000 on a long lens ( 300 / f2.8 ) and worked various angles for about 15 minutes.  I use LiveView for critical still life focusing and it was great in the dark surroundings.  I decided it was prudent to check files on the computer and see if this was going anywhere.  11:15 pm, in the heat, shooting a spider in the dark needs to yield results to hold my interest.  I found this shot and it piqued my interest to continue.

Minimum focus with these long lenses for a small subject just wasn’t getting there, so I began to think more in terms of macro.

Problem:  Spider web is 15 feet off the ground.

Solution:  Extension ladder pushed out to the last rung.

Normally I don’t like extension ladders too much.  By definition you use them when you need to get pretty high.  But it was for a potentially interesting photograph and my wife was already asleep so couldn’t persuade me how nuts it would be to shimmy up a ladder in the dark to photograph a spider.  Lucky for me there was a rock-stable position for ladder placement so I wasn’t concerned.

The challenge of course was limited depth of field with the Nikon 105 macro at near minimum focus.  I tried using a large Gorilla Pod wrapped around the ladder but though stable, a spider is not still life.   Trying to quickly readjust and critically focus whenever it moved just wasn’t working.  So I ditched the Pod and started hand holding.  Locking my arms into the ladder provided surprising stability.  I more or less keep the lens at one focus point and relied on very tiny shifts in body position, or the spiders changing position, to tweak the focal point.  Then it was a matter of shoot, shoot, shoot.  You always hear portrait photographers talk about gesture when defining a moment to trip the shutter.  The same is true of animals.  Lots of shots were acceptable but only a few had gesture that made the spider posture really interesting.  While the first shot has unique lighting. the macro really reveals the unique arachnid anatomy that is such a mystery to a mammal like me.

In closing, I would like to ask if anyone knows a smokin’ hot babe interested in posing for some scant bikini shots?

I am so ready to be inspired by something warm blooded!  LOL

Mark Alberhasky is a Nikon Mentor for the Mentor Series Worldwide Photo Treks.

Join him as he travels and share his enthusiasm for photography and learning.