Taken right after a break in the rain. I was looking around in my backyard just looking for something that would look good diagonally like a vine or a flower. Didn't find much, so I started poking around under the rocks in my backyard like I used to do when I was a kid. And just like when I was a kid, I found little salamanders who had come under the rocks to protect themselves from the rain.
Most of them were hibernating, so it's quite easy to just pick them up, place them, and pose them how you want. I chose a backlit leaf as the 'foreground' because of the lovely color and detail you get from silliouets. I didn't realize until editing, that the leaf had feather-like diagonal lines in it, so I was pretty stoked about that.
Shooting wasn't too difficult except that I had to cycle through a few salamanders because they would wake up a little bit, twitch, and then fall off the leaf. After they fell, I couldn't find them because of our deep grass, but I'm sure they're fine :)
I think I could've made this better if I was allowed to do advanced editing...like get rid of the blotchy look on the leaf, remove a couple of spots, and outline the critter a little better. Oh well...
Hope people like it, especially with my disgustingly low scores lately -__-,
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Intriguing; salamander looks like a shadow (assume he's in front of the plane of focus), his shape suggesting the f holes on stringed instruments, and the treatment of the leaf veins (framing) is fine. Could wish for left hind leg to be more cooperative, but them's salamanders.
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