A Long Awaited Reunion
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
One lesson from watching web stats the past two weeks is that my reptile pictures are my most popular. I’m more than a little surprised by this, as while they are one of my favorite types of animal to photograph, there are only a handful of reptile galleries since I don’t see them very often. But for reasons I don’t understand, I’m currently fourth ranked if you search Google for “reptile pictures” — for reasons I understand even less, I don’t even show up if you search Google’s image search for the same.
In any event, I’ve been updating the reptile pages to update some of the crufty HTML code and have re-edited a handful of the pictures as well, such as this green anole. I’ve always loved lizards and newts, but anoles played a special role in getting me into photography.
I spent the summer of 1994 working in Florida when I was in graduate school and was delighted to find brown and green anoles running all around my apartment complex. I only had a point & shoot camera at the time and was so frustrated at my inability to photograph the little things that when I got an unexpected bonus while back in school, I decided to get my first SLR. There were other things I wanted to better photograph, of course, like alligators and birds and a little gray cat, but one failed anole picture in particular pushed me over the edge.
It would be over 10 years before I saw another anole, this time a green one in Mississippi while we were visiting family in the summer of 2005. I found this fine fellow in a tree in the brutal light of a cloudless summer day. With the lizard in the shade of the tree’s canopy, I was just able to avoid the hot spots of bright sunlight in the background and still get the image I wanted.