going stir crazy, weather just won't break!

[Sushigaijin]

These days I check the weather every morning - one of these days it will get nice out...but not today. Seems like it is always tomorrow, in fact. Two from today.

[paulnj]

could be worse Erik....... I work outside in this weather :mad2:

Is that a publan milksnake varient?

[Sushigaijin]

Paul:

I'd hate to work outside at this latitude - I'm thankful to stand over hot ovens all day and night. I keep the home thermostat at a frigid 75F, and would gladly crank it higher if it wouldn't overheat the snakes! I think I am destined to live in New Mexico or Arizona...we shall see!

The pueblan milksnake and the red milksnake are technically the same species, different subspecies. This snake was found in the very southern county in illinois, I collected it two years ago. It is now about 16 inches long and slightly larger around than a pencil. I collected a female last year, so hopefully I will be able to reproduce them in a couple of years - they sure do grow slowly though! The babies are so small that they can only eat HALF a mouse tail at hatching - they take the better part of six months just to get large enough to eat the smallest pinky mouse. It will be a lot of work, but at least I can say I did it.

I've been working on some classic photo editing techniques, such as burning edges to keep attention centered...I though this shot was a good candidate, what do you think?

[paulnj]

I truely can't see a differance in the 2 images.

[Loupey]

I keep the home thermostat at a frigid 75F, and would gladly crank it higher if it wouldn't overheat the snakes!

That's balmy! I keep the office at 65F and the house that I'm renovating/half living out of at 60 I'd like to say that I'm doing that because I'm trying to build up my tolerance to the cold. But really I don't like paying the ultra high natural gas rates Cold feet all day long.

I'll have to wait to look at your editing work later as the monitor I'm on now is very uncalibrated.

The nice warm weather will come soon

[Copy_Kot]

I can see the difference and like it a lot, it really does draw your attention to the snakes head and eye.

[paulnj]

now I see a slight difference and it is alot better.

[Loupey]

OK, I'm using my old trusty laptop (advice: no one should use Window's Vista at this time ). Nice job making the PP not too dramatic - good improvement.

The edge burning technique was a standard practice for B&W's. I haven't used it in quite some time - something to rethink!

BTW, how does one get half a mouse tail?! What do you do with the other half and entire mouse?

[Sushigaijin]

I'm glad you all like it, I'll consider edge burning an option for portraits with same-subject backgrounds in the future. I've used burning or levels/curves adjustments on backgrounds before to pop the subject, but it didn't occur to me until recently that the background isn't necessarily a different subject.

As for half mouse tails, the easiest source is to clip them off a frozen mouse. I feed all of my snakes defrosted frozen mice, and the larger ones will never miss half of the tail. It's not as sinister as it sounds really, it's just like cutting up a frozen chicken, once you get past the "cuteness" factor.