Reptile Fight Club - Grilling the Expert w/ Jorden Perrett - Ethical Photography & Gear Discussion

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Grilling the Expert w/ Jorden Perrett - Ethical Photography & Gear DiscussionIn this episode we have another epsidoe in the Grilling the Expert Sereies. This time we are joined by Jorden Perrett to disucss Ethical Photography & Gear in the field. Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comIGFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network @FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQSwag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

Hi, welcome to Reptile Fight Club. I'm Justin Joolander, here with me, Rob Stone. How you do? Hello. And of course, well, of course, tonight we have a wonderful guest, Jordan Parrott, good friend. welcome thanks for coming thanks for having me on and uh we fought with jordan before so we figured tonight we'd just grill him just grill this expert on photography so um i i couldn't think of a better photographer um so had to had to get jordan on here i appreciate that yeah we got a little

bit in trouble when we had a two phoneers just you know discuss photography so um it was it was was originally in an idea that Jordan had floated. So, yeah, we're, we're excited to hear his thoughts on photography for sure. But how's it going? It's going great. Nice. He kind of got back from a bit of some travels and around the West. Yeah, it's been, it's been a very active year thus far. Lots of, lots of travel and, you know, did a couple of California trips, West Texas trips and so had an opportunity to get out there and put uh put that camera gear to work very good and i've i've seen some of the pictures and they're fantastic yeah i guess where do people see your pictures uh just while we're starting yeah i am i probably need a new home for just my

general photography um and i'll and i'll likely resurrect phonotography dot com um And use phonotography on social media here in the coming weeks. I'll put that back up there. But parrot reptiles on Facebook is where I post a lot of my specific herping photos. And of course, Jordan Parrot on Facebook as well. Post a lot of more of my landscape and some stuff that close family and friends that aren't as fond of all my spider and snake pictures are a little, you know, kind of a safe, safe place for that. Yeah.

Speaking of spiders, you found some pretty cool spiders on your trip. Yeah. We want to talk about that a little bit, but, you know, that's, you know, I didn't, I didn't realize you were as into spiders as you are. Well, it's kind of your fault. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of your fault. I mean, I've always loved the wolf spiders and been intrigued, but I was, I was kind of happy just knowing, hey, that's a, spider and hey that's a black widow and hey that's a uh you know just your jumping spiders or whatnot and i was quite comfortable going through life thinking i knew quite a bit about spiders

knowing those and about a year and a half two years ago um you know i bought a few books and realized that the best books out there really talk about families there's nothing that even really gets down to the genus level that's very inclusive uh let a lot on getting to species. And so that really piqued my interest because one of the things I love about Australia is that feeling of frontier, of finding something new, of being someplace that, you know, very few people have been. And that's harder and harder to come by in North America. But when you start looking at a lot of the invertebrates, it's pretty easy to, as soon as you start to learn a little bit, fall down that rabbit hole and realize there's a lot of frontier there.

Right. And, and, yeah, Yeah, so being in Australia and seeing those big huntsmen's kind of got my spider stuff going again. I was like, man, I really dig these huntsman spiders and seeing stuff the size of your hand. And, you know, my hands aren't small. I'm a big guy. And putting those up against those huge spiders on those gum trees and just watching them how quickly they can dart around those. And there's such an ancient group of animals, right? like they predate the dinosaurs there when they diverge from insects is just ancient

ancient stuff right so and we think of them as just being bugs and kind of classify them as all the same but they're they're so distinct and so different so yeah just the i think seeing that stuff in australia kind of piqued my interest again and then coming home and was walking some cuts with um with roy and sam roy blodgett a few months ago and saw a spider that looked a little bit like a wolf spider, but it was sitting vertical on a rock face and moved a lot more like a huntsman. And I was like, what the heck is that? And it's a pretty big spider. Yeah. So I get up close to it. I'm looking. It's like it doesn't have the right like the sepulothorax structure was wrong for a huntsman and didn't have the right eye pattern

and everything about it. It definitely wasn't a huntsman. But I couldn't figure out what it was. And so I'm looking, I'm looking, taking a lot of good pictures and come back and finally find out that it's a, it's a tennis Valverdianza, so no common name, but it's in the wandering spider, very toxic spiders that are typically tropical, but that's about as far north as they come. And this particular species was just recently identified recently in the last couple of decades. The first male was grown to adulthood in the late 90s or something, and And so it was known from just a few records, but I look back and I have like INAT records of them like eight, nine years ago. I'm like, I've seen it before, but I've never seen it with the eyes of like, wow, look at this because now I'm like getting bigger into it.

But then in this last trip was out on the same cut and the invertebrates a couple weeks ago were off the charts. So I think it was seven skullopendra heroes, you know, the giant centipedes. And four or five of Scolopendra of Viradus, I forget what their common name is, probably the green desert centipede or something like that, green centipede. And so just a bunch of large centipedes, and I got to see the giant crab spider, which is Sparassaday. It's a huntsman, a North American huntsman. So it was really cool to see it. It looks very similar to the huntsmen's we were seeing around Alice. So that was exciting to photograph this big huntsman.

And then I see this wolf spider. It looks like nothing I've seen before. Big, big eyes on it and really soft patterns, similar to a Carolina wolf spider. So I photograph it and I'm walking away and I see huge eyeshine across the road. So I walk all the way across the road. In this particular cut, there's like four lanes or five lanes. It takes a while. But you can see these eyes are just like, that's got to be a huge, huge wolf spider.

And it's a tiny, tiny wolf spider, but with huge eyes. So I photographed it. And then I'm walking the cut again. I see another one. So I end up getting three or four of these photograph them. I don't know what they are, but certainly looks similar to the Hognah genus that we're used to see in. And it turns out that it's an undescribed species that some spider guys are working on here in Texas that they're tentatively calling the big-eyed wolf spider. Wow.

But just really like soft colors on them, really just a beautiful, with the big eyes makes them almost look cartoony and kind of baby. It's just really a beautiful, really attractive spiders. So excited to see that. And now I'm starting digging and I find out that there's a bunch of undescribed but known wolf spiders. And there's people that are growing them out currently and trying to work on the taxonomy. And there's another tennis wandering spider that's down in the Big Bend region. So now I'm starting to plan trips for spiders and hoping I see some snakes along. the way.

Man, and I thought birding was bad. Yeah, burning is bad. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, I guess it seems surprising. You'd think there'd be more spider information or people that are, you know, studying. And that's interesting. I guess are they just neglected or hard to find or a combination of both?

I think it's a combination of several things, the diversity of spiders. is pretty ridiculous. And when you're looking at wolf spiders, it takes an eye to really see that this wolf spider is different than this one. You're talking about like Tigrosa versus Hognah, so completely different genus. And there's a lot of spider people

who'd probably get those too confused. You're mostly going by region or whatever else. One's a little darker. One has more orange chelis ray. But until you've seen a bunch of them, you actually have some interest. But because there's so many tens of thousands of different spiders and, you know, locally even, it's really hard for, I mean, an expert is an expert in wolf spiders.

And you start talking about latradectins or, you know, any of the other groups, sparsidae, spraic. They're out of their water. They're like, yeah, I don't even, I sent this one guy pictures, this wolf spider guy I'm talking to. And I sent him some cool picture. I'm like, oh, you'll dig some of these pictures. Had zero interest. she's like, my plate is so full with Hognah, I don't even care about Hagaosa from Australia. Like, I don't even want to see it.

Like, it'll never happen. But that's the kind of kind of, you got to have blinders on to do that. Which, you know, we see a little bit of that in Australia with the diversity of lizards. You know, if you're, you could be a gecko guy, but are you a gecko guy or are you a pygopod guy? Right. Like, there's so many species. It's not like when we were talking to our buddy, Sean, right? and he's like, I want to come to the States and see all your geckos.

And it's like, all that'll be easy. That won't take long. Yeah. And they keep, they keep splitting them up into more and more, you know, species. Yeah. I'm excited for, uh, is it seventh edition that's coming out in October? Is it seven?

Yeah. Maybe ninth. It's, anyways, it's, I think, yeah, I think seventh because the, you've got the, the most current one that I have is the sixth anyway, but I thought I had the most current one. But yeah, just seeing the new, I mean, you know, just that Galeatus that was split into three different species. Right. It's crazy, you know, so I, you know, I'm, I'm kind of a, I kind of sympathize with the

splitter side, but I could see, you know, okay, we're getting a little crazy here, but yeah, I don't know. It's a little bit crazy. Yeah. And taxonomy is just kind of funny anyway, but I, you know, it is cool to think about, you know, going to, going back and finding the different species now that you, you know, especially if you found one and then they split it into three and you're like, oh, man, I got to go find two more.

Right, right. I thought I was making progress, but every time we get the new edition, it's like I'm down another 10 or 20. Yeah, for sure. Nipper Reed gave me a first edition of the Reptiles of Australia book. I think it's even signed by the authors. And I was looking comparing, you know, the sixth edition with the first edition. It's ridiculous. Like, you know, the number of leaf tail gecko is like three or something.

And then now there's like 20 plus or O'E Dura. It was another big one where, you know, I got really excited about O'E Dura on that Central Australia trip. Yeah, they're incredible, aren't they? So much fun. So beautiful, too. That, I mean, just that purple and yellow banded the Larichia. La Rica, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So cool. That was such a cool. The marini velvet gecko is just gorgeous and impressively sized, too. Like, not a small lizard. Yeah. Big lizards. Yeah. And the ones, I mean,

Rob found a Marmarada in Northern Territory. And we got a few Jamada, you know, up there. Yeah, I got Jamada with my family. Those were really cool. I'm watching them around the Gaira. And you could tell they were on the menu. I guess you guys saw an observation of that room. Yeah, I got a little bit pretty.

Yeah. Came back and it had a big full belly. That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Good times. Yeah, so I can, I can see that, you know, that excitement and that interest of a new, you know, new field or it looks very challenging, though, similar to, you know, like a. Yeah, I'm certainly not going to go and collect all the wolf spiders of Texas.

Right, right. That's not on my radar. But I think it pertains to kind of what we're talking, what we're going to be talking about today. And that's, you know, there's a lot of stuff that when you're, when you're talking about frontier, there's only so much you can remember, right? And, you know, we don't live in Audubon's Day where we shot and killed everything

and then sketched it out on a notepad. Yeah. Get a jar and throw spiders in. Yeah, we'll figure it out later kind of thing, you know. And that's not how most of us operate. I mean, we're out there to interact with nature and be part of it. and so it's just a different way of looking at things,

but having a camera there and being able to take pictures of those things. If I just saw them and I was trying to describe them to some spider guy, and they said, oh, yeah, it's a little softer gray and had kind of bigger eyes. First of all, I wouldn't, you know, without the photo and posting it to a forum and then to INAT, no expert would have ever seen it to say, hey, that's this or that or, you know. That's probably something to add to the benefit of INAT and things like that. that were for sure you know the where do experts get these records you know if not for you know amateurs out there taking pictures and posting them to a public site like that yeah yeah good too

you know and i've had that happen multiple times i'm sure you guys have as well my first trip to australia came across something i looked in the field guides and it's a decent size the lapid we that's all i knew about it and i looked at every you know i had two field guides with me and i'm like going through for two or three nights and went through every elapid and nothing matched the maps and I couldn't figure out what I was looking at. And it turns out it was a range extension. But without having the photo of it and also the GPS coordinates, you know, that's, you know, you just, oh, it was a brown alapid.

It's like, well, what is that? Like, you're just dismissed out of hand, right? But if I have this photo and I've got GPS coordinates, now it's like, oh, that's actually a really interesting observation. Right. Versus, versus, you know, you know, just if you're a say, where it's like, I wonder,

maybe someone follows up on it, maybe they don't. But having those photos, you know, that that, that kind of qualifies that observation. Exactly. And had a similar thing when I was with my family and found that it was the, I believe the first, it sounds like the first

photograph of an adult male of a species of praying mantis. and those invertebrate guys were all excited because that's the first adult male of that species that's ever been photographed in on INAT there's like three or four observations total of that species so that was kind of cool to get that but again to me it was a gray praying mantis but to the people who cared that that was a huge observation right and i think that's another important reason to you know be kind of documenting what we're seeing even if i would say not just

even if it's not what we're interested in, but maybe especially if it's something we're not particularly interested in. Right, right. As much as those burgers finding all the green rats is annoying, you know. We're in the same mode. We're finding all these cool invertebrates and we're not, you know, sending them to experts or getting somebody excited about it. And I had one of the huntsman pictures from Kings Canyon had someone reach out to me

and they're publishing a book on the Huntsmen's of Australia and wants to use photos of that. And that was like an 800-mile range extent. And the only one ever found in Northern Territories. So like a pretty cool thing. But again, to me, it was just a big fuzzy gray huntsman. And it didn't mean anything to me personally, but it was just a cool spider I'd never seen before. But, you know, and like seeing those big Euridacus, the big, I mean, those huge scorpions we saw all over Central Australia. And I found some in the Flinders as well.

And we know the genus. and they're actually their own family of scorpion, but no one can get it down farther than genus, and they're as big or bigger than emperor scorpions. And it just seems weird that something, it's one thing when it's a small spider, you know. Right, right, right. You think it's something that, you know, fill your hand that,

and you found a few of them on a single trip, you know, it seems like that should be something that's well documented and someone should know. So there's certainly, I guess the takeaways, there's certainly no shortage of frontier out in the world if you want to look for it. You might just have to step away from chasing our list of rattlesnakes if you want to find Frontier, right?

Right. Or, you know, include that on your question. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Have some side quests. Yeah. Because I guess that's kind of what drew me to birding is kind of the same thing.

Like I thought, oh, you know, there's a duck and there's a sparrow and that you like looking at it and there's a whole diversity of different ducks and sparrows. and all sorts of crazy stuff that you would never, you know, think of. And then, and then the fact that you can IDM based on their call or, you know, you can call them in and get them to come to you kind of thing is kind of cool, you know? And if you're not finding any reptiles, there's usually a bird around, you know? So, yeah. And if you're in a new area, it's probably a new species you haven't seen before or new to you anyway. So I like that aspect of diving into a new.

group i i haven't made it to the invertebrates yet but maybe someday i'll i'll join you in that one as well i mean i think just hearing about it and talking about it it kind of gets the blood pumping and get you excited you know like oh that's cool you know something something new there and yeah why not why not take pictures of everything and and i guess that goes to it right i mean i was asking chris jolly about a gahira and uh that we saw in central australia and he said well did you get a dna sample and i said no he's like well then you're not going to be able to be able to to figure out what species it is because there's like three that look exactly

the same but you can only differentiate them based on DNA and they kind of overlap in range a little bit yeah yeah it's crazy yeah I imagine spiders are probably just as difficult or it sounds like they're more difficult you know if you can get it to the genus at least we can

know there to go hiera but well and when you look in the books it's like even to know the genus it's like microscopic look at the genitalia or the hooks on the petapile or you know on the it's got three hairs on the metarsus or it's like what like you're going to be kidding me yeah i'm not going to know all that well and i think that's where you know your photography skills come in is because yeah i i was uh in um uh the east coast in uh surfers paradise area

and we i went up to look for leaf tail geckos and i i took a scientist buddy who was at the at the conference I was at and he went up there with me and and you know it was kind of a train wreck I forgot to bring headlamps I had just so we just had our cell phone lights or whatever but he was he's a he's a big time you know like a macro photographer and he got these shots of of huntsmen's you know on trees and stuff it was fantastic just pictures and I think he stacks them you know like kind of gets that really yeah detailed stacked photos and everything thing so they're kind of more art i guess but um he's he he got one picture you know and got it got it all assembled or whatever processed and and realized it was eating another spider like you know

and you didn't even notice that when you're when you're looking at it and taking the picture and then you zoom in like oh it's eating something you know i never would have known that without that photograph and yeah i'm sure just last week get in on the hairs and stuff you know yeah last week on our way back, I saw something on the cut that looked odd, so I'd go up to it. And it was huge. And I'm like, nothing should be that big on the cut. And it turned out that it was a, oh, I'm drawing a blank on the species right now. Diplocentress. It's one of the big scorpions. And it was eating another scorpion. And hanging off the tail of that scorpion was a longhorn beetle. So you have three large, large. virgin vertebrates just in a row. And so, you know, I ended up being two or three INA observations there, you know, the different species and linking them back and forth and everything. But

it was really cool when you see stuff like that. And the reality is, I, I have never taken a class on photography. I have, it, I bought my first camera literally because I was spending time in the field and I was seeing stuff. And then when I was trying to tell friends, it's like, man, no, I found this, you know, patternless red atrox in the Anamis Valley. And people are like, no, you didn't. I could just see in the look on their face. Like, no one would ever say that to me directly. But I could just see that.

They're like, okay, come on. Did you really see that? Are you sure you were where you thought you were? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, you know, saw some really cool stuff in the field. And I'm like, I really just need to start taking pictures of the things I'm seeing to be able to talk to people because I am not. up until maybe the last 18 months, you know, no one would ever accuse me to being a social herper. I'm out there by myself with my father, with my dad, with my son, that's it.

You know, I've got a handful of friends that I would go in the field with. And it's just me and one other person, typically speaking. And so when you're seeing all this cool stuff, and we don't frequently, when we're herping together out the field, one person's maybe a mile away from the other person. Like we just start here and then take off and then come back in two, three hours, check in with each other. Yeah. And so it was just one of those things that I just hated having to describe stuff.

And I just didn't have the words for, you know, it's like, well, how big was it? I don't know. It was, I didn't pick it up and measure it. Like, it was big or it was small. And it's like, well, how red was it? It was bright red. Well, was it really bright red? Was it orange?

was it, you know? And so it's like pretty soon it's like, you know what? I just need to take pictures. And so my first digital camera was a one megapixel camera. My second one was a 2.5 megapixel camera. I was an Olympus guy for a while. And I took a picture of one of the first hypo rosy boas, hypo burregos that my father and I had collected. And just the way that orange popped in the eyes. And I was hooked. I was like, wow, if I could take pictures like this of snakes. I never thought of selling or doing anything like that. It's just like I just wanted those pictures for me. I just wanted to print them out and hang them on my walls. And that's kind of where it started. Nice. Yeah. I remember the film days and how how wonderful the digital age is,

where you can take 500 pictures. Like back then, you were lucky to take two or three and get home. none of them were good or they you know right you didn't finish your role so that it ends up sitting in the camera for three four months and then you're like forget about it by the time you develop it the film's gone bad yeah yeah whole whole other world with the film so and now um my daughter we were at the rodeo last night and she she pulls out her this film camera that she's got and she the battery um case uh latch thing is is falling off so she has to get it like a a closed pin, a metal, you know, safety pin and connect the battery to the two batteries together so she can take a picture with her film camera. And she loves the film, you know, developing the, I didn't even know the place that's still develop film, you know, and she's getting these pictures develop. I'm like, you know how like almost spit in the face of, but yeah, it's kind of fun to see her excited about a film camera.

I couldn't wait to get over to digital. And then, yeah, that kind of development through the crappy, you know, half a megapixel camera. Yeah. Yeah. And it didn't improve much, you know, like, I'm like, man, I might go back to my film camera with the garbage photos. I'm taking them of these things. Well, I'll tell you, the technology has come a long way, but there has never been a jump as big, I don't think, as there has been in the last 12 to 18 months. The difference from, you know, I've been using the Canon's one series bodies, so they're professional series bodies for 20-some-odd years now.

And the jump from the last body to the new body is, I mean, it's so, it's such a big gap that it's, it's hard to even describe. And when I'm telling people, when people, you know, because I've been posting more of my pictures recently, kind of falling back in love. with photography after having this new camera. And lots of people saying, man, you know, what camera are you using? I want to get it out, you know, it's like, well, I don't want to spend that much money. What's the next best camera to get?

And it's like, yeah, the answer to that is almost wait 18 months, wait five years, because that technology is going to trickle down and it'll be in all kinds of cameras in a generation. But yeah, it is, it's absolutely amazing what the technology can do today. What's the big difference or what? what are you attributing that to do you know yeah so they've got multiple processors and dedicated processors with AI that is aware of what's going on in the scene and then tracking focus on the eye of the animal that you're looking at that was really cool when you told me about that yeah yeah and follow the eye of the animal I'm like that and then like precapture so then

then when you push the shutter it'll go back in time like it doesn't actually go back in time It's buffering all the shots, but essentially it feels like it goes back in time and takes pictures beforehand. So you could be looking at the sky and then lightning strikes and then you click the shutter and you get the picture of the lightning strike. And, you know, it's great for a snake's striking, for a snake's tongue flicking, for birds in flight. You know, you get the wings just right every time. And so your keeper percentage goes way up. It doesn't make you a better photographer, but it does certainly include. the number of keepers that you've got.

And unfortunately, that technology is just pretty much in the top tier. I think every brand has got all that technology, whether you're shooting Sony or Nikon or Canon, but it is just in their top tier stuff right now. And I think next generation, it'll be in the prosumer stuff and the generation after that, it'll be everywhere. But basically it takes the technology that we have in our iPhones and Android,

and putting it into a camera. I mean, that's the thing is we've had all this crazy technology in our pockets. Right. But the cameras still worked essentially the same as an old film camera. They were just recording it digitally. And now they're like, well, wait, let's take all that technology and stick it inside of a camera. And it's done great. That's really impressed.

Yeah, your photos are definitely a testament to that. I've got one hanging up on my wall, and it's fantastic. I stare at it and go, man, look. look at all that detail. I don't even think my eye caught that detail in real life, you know. Well, I think that's the big thing. A buddy of mine, we're talking and, you know, the trend right now is about a video. And I think with video, it's great for taking somebody else and putting them in your shoes. And so it's great for sharing an experience with someone. But when I take a picture, when I get home, I've actually, I learned something new when I look at that picture.

When I see the detail and you can see, you know, just the detail. and the scales, the apical pits, and you see the different eyes in a cicada. I'll have to share a picture with you later that recently took. And it looks like three jewels, red jewels in the forehead of the cicada. In addition to the big compound eyes with all the texture and color in them and everything. And all of a sudden, the world is, it's a whole different world. And I think that that's what's exciting about getting into, you know, about having good glass, good gear, taking a great picture. it's like you got to experience it there in the moment

but then when you get home it's like a whole new experience all over again and I think that also helps in having an appreciation for like invertebrates and some of the cactus and chasing and some of the it's what we can't see with our eyes that you can then see through the camera lens later

so for me photography still trumps video even though I don't think I'm going to get as many likes with posting pictures versus video but I'm in it for me and there's There's just something about looking at that picture afterwards and, you know, looking at, like, the Lutosis I photographed a couple weeks ago. And then I just zoom it in. And I've done that several times.

I come and just looking at the texture and the eyes. And it's like, wow, that was such a cool animal. And then I get to enjoy it even more than I did in the moment by looking at that picture. So, right. Yeah, it's fun stuff. And then the fact that you get to relive it by, you know, seeing on your wall. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

absolutely so did you guys want to talk a little bit about uh i know when we were in the the red center we talked a little bit about the ethics of of photography when you've got a huge group running around and it's the middle of night and we got flashes popping everywhere and well i was i was listening to um Alex uh what's he's uh Dustin's buddy out of in Arizona. He was on Cush's corner. Yeah. Yeah. And he he was talking about, you know, how all these herpers are out there, you know, torturing these animals and keeping them way too long to take pictures and driving them around in their cars, which is illegal in some places. You know, he's kind of, and he's like, well, I just get my cell phone out and take a picture and I have my voucher,

my record or whatever, and then I go on my way. And then the animal's better off. So, you know, and you know that we've had some experiences with with folks where you know the arbitrary time limits respecting conditions i mean there's it's on there right yeah that was kind of the first thing that yeah right right yeah yeah and i think i think we've got to put that in perspective right um and and i i think that as with anything in life we think of a moderate taking a moderate approach, not a moderate approach, but an approach of moderation is oftentimes the right way, but you've got to ask yourself, you know, what are you trying to get out of this? What are you trying to accomplish? You know, it's like kind of the argument of sea world, you know,

do keep Shamu? Is that ethical to put Shamu in a box? But think of how many people who've developed a research or research have developed a passion for oceanic wildlife for the pelagic animals of the world right and love trying to save the whales and and what that's done for that whole group and it's like well i don't want to argue necessarily that because it's an extreme example but i think there's a lot of that in what we do and you you know it's certainly better like that then what I mentioned initially, like you look at James Audubon and what he did and a lot of people nowadays would be, you know, be really put off by that idea of naturalist and conservationist, right?

And he said, you killed everything. Or collected everything, you know. You collected everything. Yeah, or killed everything. And you look at what institutions have done. And we're talking about citizen science. And so, yeah, we shouldn't all be out there pickling every snake that we find. And so I'm certainly against that, but if I pop a flash in some gecko's eyes in the middle of the night, I'm also not going to lose a lot of sleep over that.

That being said, you know, and again, like I said, I'm trying to be a little more of a social herper and you're out there with all types and you're going to find people who spend a little more time with the animal than I'm comfortable with. And certainly if you're not a photographer and you see me pop five or six flashes in something's eyes, you're like, yeah, well, it's probably not the best thing to do. And then here, me, and I got it down because I have my recipe put together and I pop five or six. And I look at the next guy, I'm like, man, he's popping like 20, 30. And like, that's a little bit excessive. And then you get some newbie in there. And they're like an hour and a half long session and everyone's finished hunting an area. And they come back and you've got someone who's still popping all those flashes.

And you're like, yeah, that's a little bit ridiculous. But we're all kind of on this spectrum, and it's, you know, not to call anyone out. I think I was there at one point. And so I think I'd like to talk a little bit about that before we're done with our call today is really about putting recipes together and finding, making yourself a better photographer so that you can minimize that impact. Right. And I want to clarify, I'm not, I'm not dissing Alex in anyway. He's a great guy. No, no.

And I think, I like that position. caring enough for the animals. That's where it's got to come from is we've got to have the animals their best interest in mind. But sometimes their best interest is us learning a little bit more about them, us documenting what we're seeing and us sharing that passion. So I like to, one, approach with moderation, two, find a way to return more than what we take.

So what can we give back? Like when I go out and I'm shooting a lot of, photos or something, I have them in mind. I'm going to take that back. I'm going to share those photos with family and friends, maybe share them on social media, stare at a position, from a position of respect, hope that my passion is contagious, you know, build some awareness around those animals, educate people on the animals. And then if I can, maybe even contribute to science when you're talking about some of these frontier type observations. Right. And, And I think if you're doing that, then you're taking, but you're trying in your,

in your giving back, I think that you can justify maybe a little more interaction than just walking past something, you know. But, I mean, that's kind of with everything in life is you've got to find a balance. And what I'm comfortable with is going to be different than what Alex is comfortable with is different than what you're comfortable with and for all of us. So, yeah, just find that balance. But I think there are some things that we can say, hey, these are some maybe more solidified rules of, you know, of ethics, of being in the field on how we deal with things. Yeah. Especially in regards to, like, heat and, you know, if it's like the middle of the day and you're photographing a lizard or something. Yeah.

Yeah. I know someone who. I mean, we saw that in Australia, you know, the second time that we had gone where there was a sand monitor. a goalie that was on the road and then ran off the road and we're taking pictures of it and within 65, 70 seconds, it's open-mouth panting and it was like, okay, we're done, you know, let it run off and then actually got photos of it in shade on the tree where it had run up to, but it was like, okay, that's a very clear, you know, it was giving a very clear distress sign that snakes for the most part can't even give, at least as expressively as a lizard can.

I think you're totally right, right? There's an inherent selfishness to the act fundamentally. At the same time, I think sort of when people take a, as you say, it's a spectrum, and if someone's taking a really shallow view on that spectrum, I would posit, you know, my counter would be, well, you know, people are, at least, you know, to speak within the group, our interest on that particular night save that animal from being run over by the truck that was immediately behind us. So maybe, you know, maybe it always would be a photo or two.

And my interest in, you know, taking those photos, literally save that animal's life at least for tonight. Yeah. I mean, there's, whereas if we're not out there looking because we want to go take photo, again, you know, not the pickling specimens, not, you know, collecting stuff, all this stuff. But like, literally going just for the photo, you know, if we weren't out there to do that, it's not a, it's not a hypothetical. It's none that that that was the semi that would have taken out that Splendida Justin yeah right yeah if I wouldn't have parked the car in front of it so that semi had to go around me you know actually right risking my life for a Splendita they looked like it had been hit before already you know and and I think you know

another I guess using Alex again as a straw man you know like he was saying that a lot of these people are not taking pictures with that in mind of promoting the animal, but rather promoting their skills as a photographer or their cloud on social media. Right. And I think if you've got those kind of goals in mind, you're probably off base a little as well, you know. And I mean, I think you can have both. Like, I think people are going to appreciate a good picture regardless of if that's your intention or not. But, you know, I think if you're just out there, oh, I got to, I got to sit and, you know, and it's all an gradient, right?

It's all a gradient also because those people might start off with just looking for clout and then fall in love after they take just that one picture could change how they look at everything. And the next thing you know, they're studying sun spiders. You just, you never know what it is. And so you've kind of got to give people a little bit of room to find themselves. And I know in previous conversations we've had, I've talked about, you know, how important it is for the youth to get out there and maybe collect a garter snake. and that might not end up being treated as well as I might treat, you know, one of my black-headed pythons and in a big vision cage where controlled temperatures and living, you know, 30 years and, you know, and all this other stuff, it might be lucky to live 30 days. And while that's horrible, and I hope we can educate those kids and when we can minimize that, there's something about having those formative experiences and getting on a path that takes you, somewhere and if rather than shunning people because they've maybe have a shallow

rationale for what they're doing um you know and encouraging them helping them get better at it may be showing them a different way of looking at what they're looking at um i think i think our efforts are better uh better spent in helping raise those people up let them stand on our shoulders. We might not be the giants, but if it gets them just to see it just enough over the horizon that they can take the next step and the next step and the next step, you never know when you're not going to find. And how many people do we know that 20 years ago were the collectors or would flip rocks and not put them back and whatever else that now are really guardians of their local environments and people that lots of people look up to and they

But, you know, sometimes it takes touching the stove to realize, hey, that's not the way things should be done. And I think it's just human nature. So we've got to give people, I think, a little bit of room. Right. But at the same time, we've got to, you know, like I say, there's ethics is tough, right? There's reasons why there's a whole courses on them. The whole course is on them. And it's almost a dirty word because people talk in circles.

And at the end of the day, it is, it's. There is no cut and dry, right? It's like you've got to kind of justify what you're doing and what are your justifications, are they, you know, where are they coming from? So like I said, I feel comfortable with what I'm doing as long as I'm, you know, again, I also come from a family of hunters. And when we took, when we harvested an animal, it was a sacred experience. There was a prayer involved, you know, you're being able to touch that animal after it's, fallen and there wasn't this high five in. We never mounted an animal's head on the wall anywhere that just was it was food. It was a very different. And I don't look down on the people

who do have a mount on their wall and who do have this and who do have that. But that's just where I came from. And so for me, I've always, from just a young age, I've always been very concerned about, you know, my impact of the world around me and something that, you know, my parents instilled in me early on. And, you know, also being a Boy Scout and, you know, and just, you know, being taught respect and kind of ownership of the world around you and how to take care of things and not take things for granted. And I think that's all important.

Right. Well, I saw that firsthand in action in Australia with Nick and Aspen kind of just grilling you and asking so many questions. And comparing, you know, your different tech and, you know, the conversation was way over my head. And I think that's kind of what maybe has scared me in the past is like it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. And I don't, it doesn't stick, you know, like the F stops and all the stuff that, you know, so I'm kind of a set it to auto and hope for the best kind of guy or use my cell phone and help for the best. I mean, I can frame a decent shot and, you know, and then they turn out okay. but like it would be nice to have that clarity and that crispness and all the detail and everything that you just don't get when you're using a cell phone at least you know historically maybe down the road we will yeah yeah absolutely you know and there's um there's there's a few things to be said about that too there's it is really easy to be scared off of photography because there is so much technical there um and that comes back to it i mean i've recently made a post

on my personal Facebook page about the best camera is the camera that you have in hand. Right. And was recently out at the horse you bend up in northern Arizona and then on the south rim. And I think of that trip,

two weeks, 3,000 miles, took 4,000 photos. And I think two of my five favorite photos from that trip were taken with my iPhone. And, you know, when you got 30 grand worth of camera gear

that you're toting across the country and your little phone that sits in your pocket is all scratched up and takes two of your best shots from the trip. I think that speaks to the fact that you don't need to get too worried about, you know, the

technical side of things and there's no issue with being a phoneer. But there's also certain things, you know, it's the right amount, it's a matter of having the right tool for the job. Yeah. So I think, well, if I can go back with, when we're talking about ethics, I think that can be an important aspect, too, is, you know, knowing when to use the right tools and what it is, you know, starting with the end in mind. But I think what we talked about previously is a lot more kind of the ethics of herping, you know, should we be touching the animals? should be collecting the animals.

Do you keep a safe distance from the animals, don't disturb natural behaviors, you know, should you pose the environment, should you pose the animal, putting rocks and logs and bark back, you know, one of the things that I've done is, you know, if I'm out in the desert and I lift a rock and notice that it was humid underneath there, I would oftentimes, I usually have a camel back and I would just drip some water under that rock before I put it back and do stuff like that. I think there's things that we can do to minimize our impact. Sure. But when you talk about the ethics of photography, there's another side of it. So there's the ethics in how we deal with the natural world and how we interact with that. But there's also the ethics in our storytelling. And I think that that's something that isn't talked about enough, but is quickly getting maligned with how AI is impacting all the nature stuff. Like how frequently do we have people send us as, you know, being.

being the reptile guys in our circle of family and non-reptile people and we're the wildlife people, we're the snake people, we're the whatever. And so I'm sure you guys get the same kind of things that I get from all my family. And so it's like, oh, look at this. And it's like, yeah, that's not, that's not a thing. Yeah, that's not real at all. And it's a shame because the natural world is so much crazier than anything the day I can dream up. And, you know, I tell my kids all the time, I'm like, it doesn't matter what scary movie, what monster you've heard of. There is nothing scarier. Like, you give me any horror movie, any creepy, crawly, anything. And I can come up with something with nature that makes that pale in comparison. Right? Like, if you just took some of these animals and made them 25 pounds, they could just take on the world.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like, nope, I would, I'll go live on Mars. Well, even though those heroes, those are scary enough like the size they are. Well, I'll never forget. I was in the Santa Rita Mountains in the probably early 2000s and saw this, the craziest-looking snake crossing road. And I had no idea what was going on. And as I get close to it, I realize it's a scolopendra dragging a neonate atrocks across the road. Oh, yeah. And I'm just like, you've got to be kidding me.

Like, that is just such a, such a crazy world we live in. But, you know, the honesty and storytelling, you bring up a good point is posing. There's nothing. A posed shot is so obviously a posed shot. Once you've interacted with animals and you know how they sit in nature, you know where they choose to sit and how they flip their tongue and how they do this and how they do that. So posed shot always looks like a pose shot. And so if you can get them in situ, and I guess we should define in situ, right? Right.

Yeah. Like, I hate pictures on the road. Yeah. Even though that's in situ, that's where you found it. It is essentially insidu. Yeah. Yeah. It's more in situ than dragging it off and then sticking it under a bush and then taking it because

that's certainly not in situ. But it is exactly how you found the animal in the circumstances you found the animal. And in truth and storytelling, like if you're looking at it from a journalistic standpoint, if where you're finding the animal is, on the road, that's actually an important observation. You know, a hundred years from now, and you look back and it's like, oh, they used to have these asphalt roads going through everywhere, and that's how they'd find these snakes and what, you know, um, for the flying cars.

Yeah, exactly. So, um, you know, that, that is, that is part of the story of what you found and how you found it. And there are standards out there. And one I used to ascribe to was the found view standard in which, you know, You never modified the image. I think you could crop to 5%. You could, if any post-production stuff you did

had to be done on a universal scale, it could only vary so much off the baseline. So you could mask out and then make this color pop and blur this or do anything like that. You couldn't remove anything from the image. You couldn't add into the image. And that's really strict. So you kind of got to know what you're going

after. Are you looking for art that you're going to hang on your wall and that you're going to show on social media and let people like drill all over? That's one thing. Are you, are you just representing an observation of something you saw in the field? That's a completely different photo. And then somewhere in between there is if you're maybe looking for a solid identification of the animal or it's for a field guide. And that's oftentimes when posing, you know, for instance, with these spiders, oftentimes you need front, side, top, and bottom. If you don't have all of that, you're, yeah, right, you maybe get family, you know, maybe down to genus, but you've got to really have all that if you want a really good solid ID.

Most of the time with the reptiles in the U.S., we don't deal with that. But certainly there's some geckos that we found in our trip to the Red Center that I had, I had scales, you know, post-nasal scales to know whether I was dealing with this lucasium or that lucasium, this diplodactylus or that diplodactylus. And without having the macro lens of being able to get that shot, I would never have known. But you certainly wouldn't have been able to do it from an institute picture with it sitting there at distance and whatever and get that shot. So to get a solid ID, sometimes you need to have an animal in hand. Sometimes you need to get close and pose it sometimes. And certainly for a field guide, you know, you look at,

Hanson and Jackson's reptiles and amphibians of California and yeah just a masterpiece of a field guide but guess what there certainly has to be some wrangling to be able to produce something like that

it would take lifetimes to be able to do that and just luck into all that and then Photoshop it all out versus going out there and posing and so you kind of got to know what you're going after. And so honesty and storytelling, you know, don't pose something.

Don't crop this out. Don't put this in and then say, oh, this is in situ. Right. You know, don't move the animal around, put it someplace where it wasn't found, and then say it was in situ. You know, and also if you're ever hoping to win a, enter your stuff in a photo contest, a lot of the AI tools, topaz and stuff like that invalidates your photo, like right off the bat.

and so competition yeah for competitions and so you just again know what you're going after um i coined a turn back uh years ago because a lot of the guys in in the field hurt forum um were participate they were they were chilling animals in the cooler and then posing them on a rock and taking that picture so i coined the term cryotography um and it absolutely would drive me nuts to see condensation on like a masticophis sitting there in the sun in Arizona desert and it's like that's 150 degrees out there

and a snake that wouldn't sit there that's just sitting there and it's got condensation all over and you're like come on man I mean it's a beautiful image, it's art but you know that's not the animal's best interest at heart

like I'm not I don't see a reason ever to get into the to that practice but when you do pose and and like I said If you've got to get that picture and that snake and it just will not stop moving. You're putting your hands on it and did a hat trick.

You're doing this. You're doing that. I mean, I get it. And in that sometimes quite frequently, that's all it. You have to do that to get the shot. So you just have to say, hey, is it worth that much intrusion to get that shot? What are you going to get out of it? And then if you are doing that, if you do the hat trick two, three times and that thing's still spazzing out when you lift the hat.

Like, let it be. Let it do its own. thing. To your point, Rob, that, you know, we've got to look for signs of stress, be able to recognize stress in the animals and when we know that we're stressing them out, let's give them a break. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, the other, the unstated piece to this all, right, is how is this your lifer for this thing that you went halfway around the world for and have dreamed of seeing for 40, 50 years? Or is this, you know, the third one you've seen in the last 20 minutes? And And in reality, right, for the most part, it shifts from sort of being the most important thing in the world, like to get this great photo to something, you probably don't even take photos of the lot, you know, you hit some point, whatever that is.

And it's going to, it's probably going to vary based on that level of difficulty that you're speaking of, right? But if you, you know, I just, as we were going, you know, I'm thinking, A, based on the context and things, the O'Mpelle was 30 feet up in the tree. And I'm using the, you know, RX4. So at least I have a shot at getting at it, but it's like, and we're in the dark, it's going to take 600 pictures to have two that I feel marginally okay about, you know, and that's how it is, right? And, but the idea that that probable once in a lifetime experience, I'm going to, well, no, I'm going to limit myself, I'm only going to take 20 pictures and I'm not going to be happy with any of them, not even be showable to any, but, you know, beyond, oh, that's just a children's python, you know, or whatever. There's a huge range in that versus saying, oh, okay, you know, heck, I just got my first photo, it probably took 15 black racers to get a photo one, you know, when we were up in Jersey. And it was because, as you say, they are a challenge to get hands on anyway, and then, yeah, it's just the nexus of the time, the animal's response, you know, and your willingness to engage it versus saying, whenever I've seen them previously, that has. hasn't been what I was looking for, you know, is I'm looking for either pine snakes,

either northern or southern, you know, or Eastern Diamondback or whatever it is, right? And it's like, am I going to mess with this thing or am I trying to, is the real ideation of this something else, you know? Yeah. So that definitely influences how we feel about it. But I totally agree. The whole thing comes down to, you know, trying your best to do justice to the animal, both in terms of how you're interacting with it and the environment and sort of the end product

that comes from it, right? that both things are, you know, if you harass that animal for five minutes and you come away with crap pictures, you know, versus eight minutes and you get a good picture, you know, there's, I think there's some, something to weigh in the balance there. But, but, you know, we do, there's a lot that we can do to prepare ourselves before we engage with that animal so that we can maximize the time that we have with it. And rather than having arbitrary rules, you know, and say, hey, oh, we're only going to spend five minutes with an animal when we find it, it might take seven, eight, ten minutes to get, but if that animal is calm, cool, collected and it's, you know, like a lot of rattlesnakes. Yeah. And they get tucked away back into something and occasional tongue flick and they're just sitting there and you notice that their breathing is still nice and slow and there's, that's no big deal. But you take something that's constantly wants to go and you keep having to. put hands in front of it and do this and do that and whatever it's like yeah that's get the shot as quick as you can and move on versus you could spend 20 minutes with some snakes and

I have zero problems with with that based on but you've got to look at the animal that you're interacting with right like yeah no arbitrary rules just pay attention to what the animal's doing and and read and react yeah I'd super important I also kind of consider the the Walter Middie rule, I guess where Sean Penn's character is photographing as snow leopards, you know, and Ben Stiller's character says, aren't you going to take the picture? And he says, nope, that one's for me, you know. And he's just watching it through his camera, kind of as a telescope or whatever to see the animal. And, you know, just being in the moment, it has its benefits as well.

You know, you don't necessarily need to photograph and pose. is you can just watch it do its thing. And, you know, that's your deal. But that's hard to do. Again, it's hard to do. It's easier with the 15th one than the first one. Right, right. It depends what it is, right?

Sure. But yeah, that was, I had the same thought written down as something to talk through, right? It's saying even it do people like Jordan, do you feel like you ever don't experience the moment fully, say that Brettel's Python? Because of, you know, you have those. inputs right to your experience as much as someone who you know has yeah you know so that's an interesting thing yeah yeah i think me at one point in my life i would say i lost i i missed out on a lot of opportunities because i only saw things through the lens but i think jesson can attest to this like when we saw that breadlight um yeah i didn't i actually didn't get the camera out initially

like I took I snapped a phone pick of it there in situ called Justin and I just stood there and just watched it yeah and just seeing it in the tree and then even after getting pictures and stuff and then just sit there and watched it and we watched it climb all the way up to the top of the tree and found the shed and like there I make sure that I spend time being in the moment now as well as so I try to capture it but I think that goes to what I've said a couple times now is I've I build myself a recipe so that I can take like I really try to limit three to five shots and not and not for any other reason then you shouldn't need to take any more than that if you know if you can get your recipe down where your exposure's right you know what you're looking for in

composition get down compose the shot snap the shot look at it yep that's what I want and now I can be with the animal and not have to keep the pop pop pop pop move it pop pop pop like yeah and it's just a different mindset from from having done it and it goes back to my days is fishing i remember one thing that i heard that's always stuck with me is you don't tie a shoddy knot and then fish with it because you never know when your personal best is going to grab a hold of the hook so you tie the best knot every single time and if it's not the best knot you've ever tied cut it and retie it and you know i fish for you know some pretty big fish and a gulf do tuna fishing and barracuda and we're tying some pretty heavy test and learn I spent I have right right here beside the computer I've got a 1520 FG knots practice knots that I've tied and I'll sit here in conference calls and I tie knots to make sure that my knots are 100% and one of the one of the one of the best things that had happened to me was I was out on a on a boat and we're talking knots with this with this older gentleman and and he was showing me this not he was

ties and I was and it's like well have you thought about to tie in this knot and he says all that knot's impossible not to tie while you're bouncing around on the boat and I said well it's not let me show you so I tied it and he looked at it well later that night he the deckhand over there because he snapped his line the deck hand went to tie him a knot and he says no get Jordan over here I want him to tie an FG knot for me so I went over there and tied this knot for him but but I take that approach with a lot of things in life is be prepared you know know what know what your limits are know the limits of your gear and then work within that and it's when you try to push the limits of that is when you get into safety issues it's when you get into right that's that way

canyering right justin and know your know your gear is the most important thing so that's why the camera in hand is the best camera one it's there but two it's probably also the one that you know well you know don't hunt with someone else's rifle right tie your own knots you know know your own year like it's that's just an ethos that I've got in every aspect of my life and so like when I bought this new camera before going to Australia I took over 2,000 photos and there and it wasn't just taking photos in those two weeks before the trip I literally I've got little statues here with different colors different shades and I said okay for this lens what's the maximum aperture I can shoot at what's the minimum aperture I can shoot at before I start getting chromatic aberration

are they getting, you know, this effect and that effect. What can I push out of my flash? What can I do this? What can I do that? And know the gear so that when I got out there, I may be fine-tuning from session to session, from animal to animal, but I'm not having to teach myself my gear while I'm sitting there in front of the animals. And I think that's a tough thing with people who are just getting into it.

They buy, oh, they're like, oh, I got this trip coming up and they buy new gear, and then they get out there and they're learning new gear in the face of an animal at 2 o'clock in the morning. And it's just not great for the animal. And you're never happy with with the images you get from that. You might think you're happy in the moment. Oh, this is going to be great. And you get home and it's like, oh, yeah.

But that was obviously handheld, got a little bit of blur. The composition wasn't quite what it should have been or, you know, whatever else. That's some fantastic advice. I really like that scout talking again, you know, to be prepared. You've got to know your equipment. No, I really like that because I hadn't, I hadn't connected that, I guess. You know, if you care about the animals, you're going to be ready. You're going to have in mind, okay, if I find a bretles, you know, what are the settings I'm going to use to get a good photograph of that bretles in the middle of the night, you know, close to midnight?

Right. You know, how am I going to get a good shot of this thing? And, you know, and two, while we were even during the photograph, you know, photography sessions, we just sat and stared at the animal, you know, I think taking that time, because I think a lot of times I'm more worried about recording it so I can remember it later than being in the moment as well. I think that experience with the glowered eye up on the side of the cliff, you know, I'm holding in my phone up to binoculars just to prove that I thought, you know. But then once I kind of got something that resembled a lizard, you know, I could just sit and watch it in the binoculars, watch it crawl across the rocks. basque, you know, 50 feet off the ground. It was just so crazy. And, you know, I didn't have the right gear for it because my camera melted in the hot sun of the northern territory, but I could still,

you know, be in the moment. And then, you know, at least have some crappy picture that it could like prove that I saw it, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's yet another one of the reasons I really appreciate my, my time in the field with you, Justin, is that, you know, you get in there, you get the shots, you spend your time, you're present with the animals, and then I love that you then shoot a video after kind of everyone kind of walks away from it and you get the video of it crawling away and doing its thing. And I kind of see you doing all aspects of it. It's like, I'm going to grab a shot, I'm going to voucher it, I'm going to, here's my observation, but I'm also getting a video so I can share with people to put them in my shoes.

And then you do take that time with each animal and you're like, you're in the moment. And I think that's super critical. I think being present in nature is so important. And it's tough when you get around influencers, content creators. And they just, you know, they pull into a parking lot, they'll bail out with their go-pros and their Sony cameras and they're this and they get a drone up in the air and they run out there and they get their shot and they climb back in. And then, you know, the next day you run into them and then the next gorge over or something, you're like, is that herping? you know it's like yeah did you even appreciate the animal yeah you know when you talk to those

people and they don't really uh frequently they don't it's like when you go to a show and you talk to some people about the animals on their table and they don't even know what country they come from kind of a thing right like they're literally there and they're counting the clicks uh and the likes and subscribers that they're going to get from this video that they took rather than being present with the animal and you know i get home And then it's like, yeah, I probably should share some of these pictures. And I should probably document it. But it takes like weeks and months and you get it out there finally.

Right. But, you know, for me, it's, I do it for me. You know, that Sean Penn character again, it's like this is for me. So even when I take the pictures, it's usually just for me anyways. Right. Yeah, you're probably the only one that's going to see it. You know, well, and too, like I go back in some of my old. trips and I have a hundred pictures of an animal and and you know I maybe posted my favorite one or the

best one in my opinion and then I go back and oh I that's a cool shot like I yeah I haven't looked at it for 10 years but you know I can go back and appreciate it all over and and see it from a different view because I only remember the one that I posted or put on my website or whatever you know and now I'm getting a fresh view of different angles or different you know and I don't know there's something to that too, you know, where you can go back and reminisce. And it's cool what the phones do now, where they kind of give you those memories if you're on your photo app. And, hey, remember this, you know, five years ago, you were doing this and with this person,

and you're like, oh, that's cool. Because, you know, with the ease of photography and the digital storage and all this kind of thing, we also just have sensory overload and photo overload, you know. And sometimes it's almost like you need to get back just to not. take a picture and just enjoy enjoy the animal as it does its thing and and i think that that speaks to solo herping to some extent because nobody's saying come on man let's go let's go find the next one you know you can sit and watch a snake crawl you know as long as you want and and just enjoy that animal and let it do its thing you know yeah well and that reminds me of you know the trip with

aspen when i hiked up that southern hog nose and then i tried to i had to communicate to him where I was, and he had sort of, you know, he took a circuitous route and things. So I had 15 minutes there. And yeah, same thing that you were describing. I suppose both, yeah, but really, Jordan, what you were talking about, I would take with the bretel, you know, I took a shot. And I laid down, you know, in this oak leaf litter just looking at it. Because it was clear that, you know, it gave the initial back and forth sort of herky-churkey movement. And then was like, well, he's not moving. I'm not moving. Not threatened. Just sort of casually sitting. We're sitting in the shade. Just looking at one another. You know, just just, just wash.

watching for 15 minutes it you know definitely results in about 50 50 ticks but you know it was worth it that's that's saying something for um i'm cool it takes as long as i can stare at the snake yeah yeah that's funny yeah and you know um to the point you were making earlier justin about it you know some of it being so deep that it feels inaccessible um if i can i'll just take a couple minutes and share with you guys, the way that it was explained to me that really made a lot of photography finally makes sense, like it broke through. Because quite oftentimes, you know, you hear, or you look at your camera and you've got the big P, right, program mode, and you've got TV, which is, you know, your shutter speed priority, and then AV, which your aperture priority,

and then manual. And one of my favorite memes I saw recently again was, everyone's a photographer until m and it shows the duct to dial with the manual right yeah yeah um it's also a joke we have in precision rifle work is like uh if it wasn't for wind everyone everyone could be a sniper um it's really the details and in what is the difference between you know the technology saying hey i think this is the image you want versus you being the artist and capturing what you want to capture. And so what that is is, and there's certainly, there's a lot of technical behind it, but the short version is when you highly recommend anyone who's shooting a camera that's got manual to get comfortable with manual and shoot in manual, it is not as scary

as you think. In fact, I don't think it's scary at all. What you need to do is understand that your first of all a great photo comes from composition if you don't have great composition it doesn't matter if you get all everything else right or not it's just going to be a horrible picture right yeah so what's composition you know try not to just take the picture from where you stand that's how everyone sees the world if you want to really capture something different um you know go top down get down close to the ground get you know up on a ladder try try try different angles than the way we already perceive the world. That's going to really make for a much more dramatic and captivating image.

So one is composition. I would also say, too, like, don't just follow the crap. That was another thing that Alex mentioned. I keep going back to Alex. Sorry, man. But he said that, like, everybody's trying to copy somebody else's style or, you know, they all have the white angle with the, you know. And, I mean, those things are cool.

Yeah. Yeah. reason why i had this as a highlight that you know when we were talking about posing photos you know posing photos in these different things that exact point justin the jump to my mind is in terms of actually as a field guide photo or as an instructive photo even if you found it on the road if you moved it to make that wide angle that's kind of showing habitat not where you found it not the institute proper but like that context that's more instructive than anything in terms of well what's the habitat like yeah right necessarily where you find it but what does that look like so as much as much as those can feel overplayed oh that was so you know whatever mid mid teens um they there is utility to that right it was born from an idea it was then just overdone and and if you like if you like reptiles you're probably going to like where you're finding them i mean you know i i was just as happy walking down um you know some of those gorges in the red center and not seeing anything is finding a you know a cool reptile there because yeah it just it's it grounds you it centers

It's, it's just a good place to be, you know, like, how they, how, how their pattern and coloration, it's perfectly into that environment. The cymus was, again, where it's like, it wasn't clicking until, oh, I see it on this oak leaf litter and it's going, that's why it looks like that, you know, it both stood out like it was, you know, highlight, you know, highlighted by an alien beam, but it also was perfectly camouflaged. It was simultaneously both things. And it was like, yes. Oh, this is amazing.

well and that's a good point rob and i know you didn't take it this way but i want to be clear that when i you know when i say that posing will always look posed that doesn't mean like i do want to reiterate there is a time for that and if that's the shot you're trying to get those are highly instructive shots there's i love those cover shots from herp review um you know in grismer's books and uh there's just something about those shots that puts you there it's like man i you know That's what it's like to walk up that gorge and then you look to your left and there's that rattlesnake sitting right there under the Ocoteo and to be able to put that together, even if that's not in situ, that is a fantastic way to show off the animal and the habitat it's in. You just have to be aware of everything else that you're doing and recognize that what you're doing is posing an animal, be aware of where you're putting it. is it okay from a heat standpoint? Are you increasing its chance of predation or this or that?

Obviously, it's a big, messy situation. Just be aware of what you're doing. If that's your target, go for it. I love looking at those photos. I take those photos when I can. But yeah, I don't want to say that institute is the only way to go. But certainly, if you're just, that's the least impact. So you don't have to justify anything. if you're 30 feet away and you take a picture of a rattlesnake off in a distance. I won an award for an A-Trox photo, and it's one of my favorite photos I've ever taken. And I shot it from, I think it was my 400-millimeter lens, and the A-Rox never saw me, but it could smell me. And its tongue was, it was doing the whole long, slow tongue thing, and I'm back, and I lay down on the ground.

And it looks like I must have got right in his face, but I'm probably 18 feet away from it. and this I just got to spend like an hour and a half one morning with this rattlesnake in in uh funny enough it was in the Santa Rita's um and uh just got got a chance to spend time with that animal and it was incredible and it just it ended up being uh won an award for that photo and it's uh I think I've got it hanging on in the hallway and it was just a lot of fun to be there in that moment and to know that that there's something about that picture you can tell that I think I'm I hadn't touched it, right? It is exactly how when you walk up on a rattlesnake from a distance and you see it first that it's it's it. And then the way the tongue was out, but it's looking away from me. It's a, you know, about 80 degrees off of me. So I'm all the straight profile on it.

And there's an ant crawling up over its back, you know, and just everything about you're looking at it. It almost looked like I sent a buddy to go around, oh, hey, get its attention over here and then take it. And when, when the stars line up and you get an opportunity to take it. that shot. I don't think anything beats that kind of a photo. But certainly, like I say, hey, if you're trying to instruct with the image, there's hardly anything better than something that includes the habitat to give people an idea of what it is. It's not just zoomed in on the

animal where it's at. I mean, that's what we love about it, to your point, Justin. There's nothing better than your death marches in the middle of the day. And getting to see those canyons when we're all overheated and dying and dragging people out. But that's a big part of it, right? We love being in nature. It's not just about finding the animals. We're out there even when we know we're not going to find the animals. Right, right.

And, you know, other things that you're finding in the environment or just experiencing the environment that they're in, you know, I mean, they're not necessarily in those conditions. They're tucked away somewhere a little cooler, but still it's like, you're seeing how harsh the environment is that they live in. So what's the strategy are they having to use to escape this ridiculous daytime scenario, right? Exactly. It's crazy.

Yeah. It really is. And ultimately, right, we're just trying to make sort of like an analog version of our ephemeral experience of the thing. Yeah. Which is really, you know, as much as anything, right, well, why are we taking these photos in the first place, right? And sometimes it's to be able to post them to share them to, i naturalist to you know citizen science this sort of thing just my most frequent motivation is just to have that i want a good picture that i a picture that i find good for myself to my taste

to remember it you know remember that ephemeral that transient experience that i had which often is as often about how we as a group you know our interaction our enjoyment the find the suffering you know that's what I think of with the abysis, right? You know, is, you know, well, Nipper had, you know, a slightly better kit, you know, came out with, oh, his is just slightly crisper and, you know, what, and he definitely, you know, took the time to process it more and all those things. His is probably objectively more, if you were going to pick one for a book, you'd pick his photo. But for me, I remember, you know, okay, well, I remember what that took, you know,

and what that, what that entail, what that looked like, and that that was the best we could do in those constraints, right? right right the camera that i had you know when we were down there that that brings up another question maybe get get your input on this one is you know when when three different people are taking pictures of the same snake and then they post their pictures and they all look like three different snakes you know how do you how do you match and and i guess everybody's eye could see it differently as well i mean there there's no saying that the way i'm seeing is exactly the same as you or rob would see it so right yeah yeah How do you match reality with your camera?

Yeah. So it's one of things I'd made a note to even bring up was talking about color fidelity because it's something that I don't think a lot of people pay attention to. So to step away from the technique a bit and to talk about that, when you look at how a camera sensor works and they're all different. But when I first got into photography, one of the typical ways that the CMOS and CCD sensors were built is that the each pixel was pulling a different color, right? And the way they aligned them, you had more green pixels than the other pixels because when you do it in a grid to have everything laid out perfectly to where you don't end up with chromatic aberration and end up with moray patterns and different things is you've got to align the color pixels in such a way to get it.

What that means is you end up with cameras that are going to be more sensitive to certain colors and less sensitive to other colors. And then the processor that they put in the cameras, when it tries to find white balance, what it's trying to do, you camera is trying to do two things. And this is why I say it's important to shoot in manual. Your camera tries to do two things. One, it tries to find a neutral white. Two, it tries to find a good exposure. It's trying to, what it's looking to do, if you take your camera, put it on, on P, on program mode, and you take any picture and then you were to go into Photoshop and blur

that picture until you can't see anything. It's just one solid color. It's going to be neutral. I forget what is it? Is it 80% gray or whatever? It's going to be, it's shooting it for a neutral color. The whole thing across. That's what the blend is going to be. Okay. So the camera doesn't know that you're trying to shoot dark or trying to shoot light. It doesn't know that you're in the red center and the sand is red and the animal is red and everything's red. It's going to try to find a way of finding a balance, a neutral balance from a light and dark standpoint and from a color standpoint. And so when you, if you look at some of our different photos

from when we were in the red center and the way we processed them, for me, I shoot, this goes again to knowing your gear, I took a gray card and I used my flash that I used, for the whole trip while we're down there, I shot it and I know what color of lights coming from my flash. Okay. So now I've color graded my flash and I know what inputs. So what color temperature and what tint to put on all of my images that I shoot with that flash.

With that diffuser, because every diffuser is going to add some color as well. So I say, okay, with this setup, it's 4950 on my temperature and plus seven on on my tint. And if I do that, I'm going to get neutral gray on my gray card. So that light is going to be, that's what that's going to give me every time. That's what I want. So then when I came home and I had over 5,000 photos from that trip, probably 4,000

them were taken at night. I could literally select all my night photos, set my color, set my tint, and every picture is the same. And when you look, that, you know, I did bring some sand back. And if you look at my pictures and you look, at the sand, they match, the colors match. Now, yes, people see colors differently. So that's also something to take into consideration. That's when you need to trust your tools. So shooting with a gray card means that no matter whether you're colorblind, you can't see that color. You're actually

going to be representing that color right. So that's a good thing. But if you talk about photographing an animal like in the early morning or in overcast conditions or in the evening with a sunset, When you've got orange light that's coming in, you're putting orange light on orange sand on an orange animal. You're going to get some ridiculous colors. And when you take that picture, people are going to call BS. But that's literally what you were seeing. And your camera is going to try to tone that down. And so knowing what the grade is and say, no, I'm going to set it this way.

And that's it. And that's going to be honest. That's important. But again, you got to know, you got to start with the end in mind. Are you creating art? or are you trying to represent your observation? Right. So if you're trying to be true to the color, that's a very different thing

than if I just want something that's going to knock your socks off and sell it and hanging on walls and, you know, that kind of a thing. And an interesting note there is the, like, clobberi, you get a really nice green clobrii. That's one of the hardest things for a lot of people to photograph because people don't shoot with gray cards. Let's do the gray card. You'll get the right green every single time.

how I learned this was one of my good friends that I did a lot of web work and did a lot of photography for were big ball python breeders and they produced the first Mojave's and lots of people were struggling to show the crazy kind of green issues in those Mojave ball pythons and so he's like I just can't get you know he had a better camera than me and everything else and he's like I'm struggling with this maybe come over and we can brainstorm this. And so me being me, fell down the rabbit hole, learned all about color grading, learned about how CMOS sensors work, how STD sensors, what the shortcomings were, what it takes to really

do this right and everything else. And we were able to get some great photos, get those out there. And so people knew what Mojave's looked like for the first time, you know, because people were talking about them. But all these pictures, they just looked like a little higher contrast, regular ball python. But you never saw those really weird kind of greeny, blue hue. that they had to them. Yeah, like really neat, neat colors. So

what was interesting about that is again, self-thought wasn't, I had not made any money off my photography, was doing that to help a friend and learn more about doing that to build their website. And that turned into a six-figure income

and working in digital publishing and working for Pearson education and dealing with pantone colors and And, you know, that was my life for about three, four years. And it's all because I was trying to figure out how to capture the color of a Mhabi morph ball python. But that's gone a long ways to understanding more of how the cameras work.

So that kind of goes back to what I was started off on is if you want to take what it takes to get a good photo and distill it down to just a few points. So like I said, the first one is compositions. So not only just the angles and how you're going to frame out what you want, but also when you're looking through the. there look at all your corners i can't tell you how often even knowing what i know now i so frequently i'll end up trimming the edge of a leg off of a spider and there's nothing worse than having one leg cut off and the other seven legs and you're like i mean that's right you know like cutting someone's forehead off in a family photo like you see when crazy uncle johnny takes the picture or whatever right um but but watch your corners be intentional about when you cut something and if you're

going to cut something, don't just barely trim it. If you're going to cut it at all, then get right in there, right? So be intentional about your compositions. Really look around your corners, make sure that what's in the image, you want in the image, what's out of the image, get it out of the image. And then be intentional with light. So if you're not using a key light, you're not providing your own light via a flash or some other way, then know where the light's coming from and be intentional with how you position yourself. So if you're shooting a rattlesnake and they've got those um those those those oculars that are covered and they throw so much shade onto their eyes so make sure you've got a good angle coming in and if you need a little bit

of fill flash to throw them to their face then do that with just a little bit of fill flash even if it's two o'clock in the afternoon don't be afraid to use flash i use flash almost all the time on any shot i was catching a little bit of flack right just when we were in the red center and i was shooting birds a hundred yards away and I had my flash pop and then the guys are like, what do you shoot with a flash for? It's like 2 o'clock in the afternoon. But that's also when you have really bad sunlight, when you're dealing with harsh light, you can soften that by throwing some light into the shadows. Okay. So one, know where your light is coming from, watch your corners. So that just all comes down to composition. So you do that. You should be doing that,

whether you're looking through your iPhone or Android or whether you've got a, you know, a pro camera. The composition is king. The next thing that you can, that you can affect from an artistic standpoint is aperture. An aperture is going to give you your depth of field. Do you want to isolate the animal that you're shooting? Go with a really shallow depth of field. Or do you want a deep depth of field and you want to show more detail further down? So, you know, if I'm getting up close in a rattlesnake's face and I want to show the, and it's kind of looking at me at maybe a 45 degree angle. If I want the nasal scale, the tongue maybe to be in focus, and I want the heat pit in focus, and I want the eye in focus, right? That's going to be, if I'm pretty close,

that means I've got to have quite a bit of depth of field. So an aperture, that's going to be a higher number. So your F number. So you want to go as high as you can go without negatively impacting image quality. So for instance, on my macro lens, I've got an old EF 100 macro at F-32 is the highest it goes and F-2.8 is the lowest it goes. If I shoot it at 2.8, I'm going to be lucky to get the front of the eye in focus as well as the back of the eye in focus. I'm going to have to make an artistic decision what I want there. But if I dial it down to F-32, I can get the whole head in focus, but everything's going to look just slightly blurry. I'm not going to get it nice and crisp. So for that particular lens, the particular

lens I have. At F-22 is kind of the sweet spot where I get lots of depth of field, but I'm not starting to get all the weird effects on the lens. So I know that I can shoot F-20, F-22, and I'm going to be super stoked with my images. So that, again, like I say, build a recipe and then follow that recipe. So if I'm shooting macro, a lot of my macro stuff, and I want good at the field, I'll dial it up to F-20 or F-22 on that particular lens. There are lots of lenses that F-22 is absolutely. garbage don't go that high you know you're pushing your limits at f11 but so yes the higher the number the bigger the depth of field but note that as with everything else approach with moderation if you go way down tight you know lots of depth of field you're going to have poor image quality if you go way open oftentimes you'll also get poor image quality so you want it open enough or close enough to make that artistic decision of how much blur do you want in the background and versus how much of the subject do you want in focus, right? So composition and then aperture.

So if you're setting a manual, right, let's set our aperture. And like I say, if we're doing a macro shot, I'd set to F20. So the next thing is your shutter speed. Well, for shutter speed, it's also artistic in that you can choose whether or not you want motion blur. If I've got an animal flying, and I can with the animal, I can blur in the background. You might get blur in the bird's wings or Cheetah's legs it's running or cars, wheels spinning

and then the background blurring but the car is sharp and focus if you can pan just right. So a slow shutter speed will give you the ability to show off motion if you're trying to tell the story of motion. But if you want to stop, like you don't want this blur

in front of the snake's face, you want to actually see the black tongue hanging out on a rattlesnake and full threat display, then you're going to need to be fast enough shutter speed that you're going to be able to freeze that action. And how fast that is, you're just going to have to play with that to kind of know. If I'm shooting birds in flight, I'm shooting one 2,000th of a second, one 4,000th of a second, one 6,000th of a second to get those

wingtips so that they're really sharp. Depends on the bird, how hard they're flapping, how fast it's moving. How much light there is. Well, and then how much light there is, yes. So keep in mind, every time we're doing this, we're also affecting how much light is coming in but I don't worry so much about that anymore and I'll get to that when you get when you get down a little bit later so yeah so after depth of field and then shutter speed is just how much do you want to freeze and but there is kind of a limit to what you can shoot unless you're putting it on a tripod and the rule of thumb for that is your focal length in um your shutter speed so if I'm shooting my 100 millimeter macro the rule of thumb would be don't go slower than one one hundredth

of a second. So one 60th of a second, and you're hunched over something and you're kind of shaking a little bit and you take the picture, all those shots are going to be a little bit blurry. Of course, if you've got good technique and a newer camera that's got image stabilization in the body, image stabilization in the lens, that rule, you can fudge on that rule a bit. But even then, I typically shoot, my recipe is one two hundredth of a second when I'm shooting macro on a hundred millimeter lens. That just means if I'm like sitting there and I'm really straining because I'm in a crappy position trying to get a picture of a spider and it's tucked around the backside of a rock and I'm like hanging over there and I start to get the shakes

a little bit. One two hundredth of a second I'm going to be able to freeze that action. So yeah, now you've got those are the only two things that really impact the artistic side of that image. Those three things, I guess, the composition, but that's not really sitting on the camera. So aperture and shutter. And you don't need to change those things for Like, for instance, if we're talking about night photography, I set it for one-two-hundredth of a second, F-20, and I shoot that all night long. It doesn't matter what the conditions are, every shot that way, and I'm going to get great shots with everything. Okay. The reason being is then at night, I'm using flash to provide my light.

So another bit of advice is don't buy great gear, and then shooting an all manual. You can buy cheap gear if you want to shoot everything in manual. But if you're spending the money on better stuff, let the technology that you bought, you know, give it its wings, let it fly, let it do its thing. And so shoot an ETTL on your flash at night. And then what it's going to do is if it's darker or lighter, it's going to make up for that with how that flash pops. And so you don't have to worry about, oh, I need to shoot slower, I need to shoot faster,

or I need to let more light in or less light in through the aperture. You can literally make those two decisions based on artistic taste and then let the flash in ETTL make up the difference for you. What does ETTL stand for? It's electronic through the lens. And so what it is is the flash reads the scene and then says, oh, I think you want this much light. Okay. And then again, in knowing your gear and knowing that your camera is trying to get a middle gray if you were to average out every pixel across the scene. And so if you look at the situation and it's a dark animal on a dark background, you don't want

that to be brought it to middle gray, right? If it's a really melanistic animal and then back in some dark lava rock or whatever, you want that to be a stop or two down. You can then adjust and bring that flash down at that point. But you want to start off with, hey, this is neutral. I want, because your cameras, that's what we're paying for as a camera that can make those decisions for you and give you a really good baseline. So trust your gear and do that. And then if you're talking about in the daytime when you're not necessarily needing a flash. The ISO, set it to auto ISO, the ISO settings

and the ISO is how sensitive your oversimplified version of what ISO is, is it's just how sensitive your camera is, your camera sensor is to light. So if you shoot in auto ISO, again, you don't have to then worry so much about what your shutter speed is or your aperture.

And high ISO is going to give you a little bit more grainy a shot, but having the right shot, but having the right shot having a look the way you want it to look and being a bit grainy is still going to be a fantastic shot versus missing the shot altogether or having it blurry or having it right like if it's out of focus or um it's just everything else is wrong you can't save it but if it's just a little bit grainy i mean look at shots of look at the old photographers Ansel Adams and whatever else like the gear they were using right i mean there's people who add grain to images to make it you

know, have more of a feel of being there. And, you know, don't be afraid of a little bit of gray, you know. Yeah. So. Cool. And I think that's just the, from the technique standpoint, that's where I'd leave it. You could teach, obviously, they do have courses. You can teach and listen to this for years and go into the, to the degree on each of them.

But I think, I think that gets most people, we'll get them over the hump of being afraid of manual. Okay. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I've had experiences with my cousin, who's a kind of semi-pro photographer. And well, my dad was out with him, and they were shooting in Canyonlands down the Needles District. And he had the shot he wanted, and he set up his camera and sat there for hours waiting for the light to be right, the condition, you know, the angle of the sun, just everything to be perfect. Like, my dad said he turned around and looked at what was behind him and it was just on fire. It was beautiful.

It was amazing. And dad's like, hey, check this out. Look at this. You know, and my cousins like kind of gave it a quick glance and, okay. Oh, yeah, cool, cool. And went back to staring at the same thing you'd been staring at for an hour. I'm like, oh, my gosh, that would drive me nuts. I don't have the patience to be a real photographer, I think, and like a landscape photographer.

But, I mean, his pictures speak for themselves. are fantastic but yeah oh man i i don't have that patience either i i am a herper first right i'm there and then one of the reasons that i built the recipe that i've got is because i literally want to take like i say just a handful of pictures and move on to what's next i don't have the patience to sit there and i don't feel like it's the good good thing for the animals to just sit there and get flashed out all night either so get me in there get get the shot and then move on and go find what's next like i i just i want to be in there yeah i want to be in there i want to be in there i want to i want to experience the world i don't just want to take pictures of it right right and and you know

knowing what you what you need to do and getting in there and doing it you know yeah it should be a quick process if you know what you yeah yeah certainly when you're talking about our the night stuff i mean if you're if you're road cruising you're out there at night figure it what your recipe is and then you have no reason to take any more than two or three shots. Right. Right. Right. You got it. Get out there. Snap your shot. Move on. There's no reason to just beat that animal up. Um, hike in the same way. I mean, if it's nighttime, you're not dealing with sun at this weird angle and a cloud comes over and there's dappled shade and you don't have to make those decisions. You're popping a flash. Figure that out at home before you get out in the field

because nothing changes. Dark is dark. Right. Yeah. Yeah. What do you, uh, test it on? Do you just take a snake outside in the dark or what do you know i actually have i have a little uh ceramic rattlesnake statue okay here on my bookshelf okay and that's what i do most of my testing on because it you know you've got some texture there you've got some other things so i can try um and like i say i start with every lens when i buy the lens i start off and i's like what's the wide open aperture and i've got what they call the pineapple the 85 millimeter it's like a three thousand dollar lens and that lens is garbage wide open, but you stop it down just a little bit,

and it's the best lens that Canon's ever produced. It is just a ridiculous lens, but it weighs twice, what my camera body weighs, and it's only an 85 millimeter prime, but it's this huge, they say they call it the pineapple, it's just a huge lens.

It's a ton of fun to play with, but you end up with the really weird colors and stuff, but if you just buy this lens, you're like, oh, it's crazy expensive, everyone loves the lens, it's the best portrait lens they've ever made, and then you get out in the field with it,

and you don't know how to use it, you're going to hate every picture you take with it. But as soon as you figure out what its limitations are, and then it's like, get out there. But yeah, you've got to know that. So, yeah, I bought it, set it there wide open, one click down, one click down, one click down, throw it into lightroom, look at all the pictures.

I'm like, okay, it's usable from here to here, make a note of that, great. Now from shutter speeds, when I'm sitting here and I'm holding it with this kind of light, what do I get? With this flash, you know, shoot my gray card. With this strobe, shoot my gray card. Make a couple of quick notes.

put that in my phone. And it's literally like five or six lines of stuff. And I've never even had to refer to it because it's so little that you need to know. You just have to sit there and do the work and just say, okay, here's my limits. And you don't need 20 lenses. I literally use two lenses. I carry like four lenses with me all the time. But I'm always using one of two lenses, my 100 millimeter macro, my 400 millimeter. All my other lenses, I just bring them. I'm always thinking, oh, I'm going to take a great landscape shot. I'm going to do a couple of grismarest shots. I'm too anxious to get on to the next animal. And so 100 millimeter macro, move on. Oh, it's a bird or a chuck wall off in the distance, throw my 100, 400 millimeter on, snap that

pick. Yeah. And those are those prime lenses? Are they? Yeah. Yeah. Those are primes. Okay. What's the benefit of a prime over, say, like 40 to 400 or whatever, you know? Yeah. So 40 to 400, certainly, obviously, there's a lot of benefit in that from standing in one position, you've got the full range. You know, you can shoot a grismarist type shot all the way down to, hey, I can get that chuck wall off and that rock that's 60 feet away. The problem is, is that at none of you, that, the image quality is going to be relatively poor compared to a prime at any one of those focal lengths.

Okay. So, um, my 400 millimeter prime is going to be second and others. I've never seen a zoom that comes anywhere near what that 400, 400 millimeter prime would do, even significantly more expensive lenses. Likewise, with the 100 millimeter macro, I've got a 70 to 200 zoom that is a very expensive lens, but it collects dust because that 100 millimeter macro is just ridiculously sharp. I mean, you can get in. I've got what's called a Raynox magnifier, 2.5 magnifier in the front of that,

and take pictures of spiders that you can barely even see to the naked eye and you just see all the hairs on their chelisse ray and you can see I mean it's just so cool when you can get that kind of detail and that lens can do it and it's and they're also less expensive than the zooms so yeah if you're talking about going out and buying gear um I'm not saying always buy primes because it really comes down to what kind of photographer you are and what kind of pictures you want to take if you're just

snapping pictures throwing them eye at you're not looking to ever put them into a book you're not that worried about printing them and hanging them on your wall um a zoom with some good reach is probably going to get more use but if you think you want to maybe go the next step and you really want to pull the details out of some of these animals and you want to really get into it and enjoy it i mean a couple of good primes goes a long way okay no that's great advice yeah yeah cool So you alluded to it a little bit there. What does your processing look like? So you take these pictures.

They're on a digital camera. Save your memory card. Yeah. Go from there. So, again, it comes down to recipes. What does that even mean? Yeah, I shoot in raw. So the camera has a native way of pulling the data.

And what that is. So JPEG is what a lot of cameras will shoot in and my pro cameras you can choose to shoot in jpeg and or raw i only shoot in raw um i feel like my process is quick enough i can i can automate almost all of it so that i don't have to mess around with keeping a jpeg version plus a raw version so i shoot 100% in raw and the and like i said the raw is it's is the native file format that comes from the camera so it just grabs the raw data coming off that sensor and saves it off in its own file format. That's what the raw file is.

The advantages of shooting raw is that because you have all the sensor data, nothing's compressed. And so what I mean by that is in JPEG digital compression to make that file smaller, it's going to say, hey, I've got a green pixel here, I've got a red pixel here. Well, when I compress it, let's maybe merge those. And this one's not quite as green and this one's not quite as red. And let's kind of muddy it a little bit and maybe be a brown pixel there in its place. But what that's going to do is reduce that file size significantly. But it also, if you try to zoom in, you're going to crop that, you can do anything, you lose some detail there.

And if you want to post process and you want to say, hey, I want to shift my colors, well, if you shift green on the spectrum a little bit or red on the spectrum a little bit, that's fine. You can make it a little more green or a little more red. but if it's already compressed it to brown, you can't make it more green or more red. It will always be brown. So by shooting raw, you preserving all that raw detail that the camera got so that it gives you the ability

in post to do things. So as I become better with the tools, I can go back and look at a raw file from like 2007 or 2004. Well, yeah, here's a good example. I took a photo in 2004 of a Tanajalta's white rattlesnake. And it was cool to go back and take that shot again and throw it into Photoshop or Lightroom and to be able to go and look at that and say,

hey, did I process that the best I could? Could I have done a better job of bringing out the shadows or doing whatever and to be able to retouch that? You can do that with Rock. With a JPEG, it's done. That image is what that image is for forever. So what my process is, yes, I've got a card or two cards. My camera takes two cards. So I have a couple of cards full and come in, plug them into my computer, and I move them all onto a physical hard drive via Lightroom tools. And Lightroom will then bring everything up, and I've got two screens, and I'll have like all the thumbnails on one screen, and then the other screens dedicated to the full-size image.

What I'll do is I will look at my images, And like I said, I've got a recipe for shooting at night. So anything that was taken at night, the one light source, I know exactly what its color is and its tint. So I'm able to go in and make a broad adjustment across the base. I also know that I like to something that's a little more contrasty. I like to bring out my blacks a little bit more. I like the texture to be just a little bit higher and to bump my sharpness by just a certain amount. out. But in doing that, I don't do it across the board. I do a quick mask down so that I'm only

sharpening the edges because you don't want to bring out the, there's noise in an image. You don't want to bring out the noise in the image by sharpening the entire image. And so there's a couple different keystrokes. But what I do is I'll take one image that's in that scene. I'll make the adjustments that I want. I can say copy. Then I select every image that was taken using that same recipe that 100 millimeter macro 1-200 to a second at f-20 with that flash highlight them all and then i just hit paste and then they're all done and then from there if i want to hey this one i could have like i've got too much maybe dead space around the edge of this i want to crop it in a little bit move that animal a little bit more to the corner i love the idea when i look at my pictures

i try to i think in terms of potential motion so if it's a hawk that's sitting in the air i don't want it sitting in the middle of the screen. I want it sitting off on the right with its head facing a lot of open space with a lot of open space below it. As wildlife people, we know that that's what the hawks are doing. They're moving in a direction. They're looking down below. So I want to see this whole image is like 85% 90% blue sky. I want that hawk or eagle up in the top right hand corner with its head facing out and its talons down. And it shows that potential motion of where it would go, what it's doing. And it tells a story. Right. So I try to do that with everything. My rattlesnakes shove them down in the bottom corner with their head facing

towards the center of the screen. There's rules with thirds. There's a lot of other things. It's good to read up on that, learn that. You know all the rules so you know when to break them. But, you know, as animal photographers, I think that's a big part of the story is what is this animal going to do? What could it do? What's the next step? And being able to tell that by how you position the animal there. So I'll oftentimes, I'll come in and clean that up a bit if my horizons are a little bit tilted because again, I'm reaching around a corner and I'm shaking and whatever and I've got, and my horizons are a little bit off. I'll make those adjustments one off, but it's pretty quick. So I adjust one, paste it across the other, quickly go, click through them. Photoshop does have a rating scale.

So I set it to when you rate an image, it automatically advances to the next image. So I can sit with my fingers over one, two, three, four, five on the keyboard. And then my one finger on my other hand on X. And I can quickly say, hey, I'm going to rate this as a one. I'm going to rate this as a two. I'm going to rate this is a five. This one's trash. I'm going to hit X.

And as fast as I can, and I just really quickly breeze through my images. So I went through all the Australian images in one sitting, over 5,000 images, sat down and just as quickly as I could hit. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And I don't use them. I don't grade him as one as bad. two is better, three is better yet, four is pretty good and five is best. I rate him as one. I don't want to delete this image. And oftentimes I'll just use one, three, and five. Three is I want to develop this one. I want to spend time and work on this one, but it's probably

not anything I'm going to share to social media. I want this for my records. This is something that someone says, hey, I'm putting a book together and do you have any photos of this species? I can say, hey, you know what, I'm pretty sure I do. And I can jump back and look at that. And then my fives are the ones that are going to go to social media are the ones I'm going to email off to friends or whatever else. It's the cream of the crop that I'm so excited to see this picture. I can't wait to get it out there, right? Yeah. So I just quickly give everything a one, three, five, or delete.

And as quickly as you just glance at it and this is a one, this is a three, this is a delete, this is a five, this is a delete, this is a three, get through all of it, copy and paste my settings across the board, quickly check if I need to do any crops and then export them all out. That's it. And you export them as JPEGs at that point? I do export them as JPEGs. Okay.

And so when you've shot in raw and you've got the crispness and then you've processed it, then exporting it to JPEG, does that cause those issues again? Or does it preserve what you've, what you've? Well, I never delete my Raws. You can always go back. Yes, so I can always go back. Can you print a raw? Like, is that?

Okay. Okay. So that would maintain all of the Christmas, but it's just a huge file size. Is that the... It's just a huge file size. There's other lossless files. There's TIF. Oftentimes, if I'm going to send it off to get printed, because I'm going to send it to a friend to hang on his wall or something, I'll save it off as a TIF and ship that off to the printing company, and that's what they'll print off of. Right. Because that's a standard. It's not proprietary to my camera manufacturer. But yeah. So what I do is, and also, you know, for social media, 2048 on the long, 2048 pixels on the, on the longest portion is,

I believe what the current standard is for Facebook. So when I export, I have a recipe set to export for Facebook. So if I know it's something I'm going to post to Facebook, I just select those, export to Facebook. It puts in a specific folder for me, tags all those images, and then it resizes them down to that.

So they're tiny, tiny images. is they take less than a megabyte or maybe up to two megabytes a piece versus 30, 40 megabytes a picture for the Raws. So my Raws, I keep those, I store those in case I ever need to touch them again or if I need to print them out large or someone wants them for a book, great. I've got those. But what I'm sharing is just tiny, tiny files. And so they stay on a little folder in my documents.

I'm a Mac guy. It's in my documents folder. So it's on my phone. It's on my laptop. It's on my desktop. If I'm sitting there having a discussion with someone at a trade show or we're out in the field and someone's like, oh, have you ever seen this before? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to see a picture of a cool one?

Here you go. And I can quickly grab that and show that without, you know, filling up all my, all my devices, hard drives. Right. That's cool. Nice. Well, that's, it's making me really want to get back into photography. This is a dangerous conversation, Jordan. Yeah, it is.

And I'll tell you, I think that's one of the important things with photography is find a support group. Right. It's a bit of an addiction. So one, to help you stick with it after you invest that money and stay with it and bounce ideas off of friends. And I've got two buddies that I'm really close with that we all have, all three of us have the same body. And we've had the one series bodies for a few generations now between the three of us. And so it's fun for us to play off of each other and we'll sometimes meet in a park or something and just go take a couple pictures of ladybugs and flowers and whatnot and share techniques and this back button focus type and this type and this and play with that. And, you know, when they go to, if I'm going to Australia, I could borrow a lens from them.

If they're going to Costa Rica, they borrow a lens from me. And it's nice to be able to do that and have a group of guys using similar gear. and being able to share all that. So that's super helpful if you're looking to fall down the rabbit hole. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, Rob, did we miss anything? No, I think this has been great.

It's super technical. I like that. And started really with, yeah, I think the fundamentals of the thing. So, no, I think this was really good. You had kind of hit on this earlier. I suppose I'd ask, sort of in the age of AI, what is the utility of us taking these photos that'll be, you know, from your perspective when they'll just be auto-generated utilizing our data or we'll have sharks on trampolines and whatever? That's a scary thing. You know, being a technology guy as my day job, I embrace AI.

And as I said, you know, the camera body that I love so much, my new camera body has certainly got its fair share of AI in there. I don't use it for sports, but it actually understands sports, and you can tell it to recognize your own team. You can upload pictures of the team members ahead of time, and it'll make sure that they get priority focus. It understands how the game is played. So if there's a ball between two people, it knows where it's being passed from, who it's being passed to. it understands volleyball so if someone's setting it and you've got someone coming up to spike and someone coming up to block it knows to focus on the person who's going to be spiking it uh it knows not to focus on the refs it's crazy to have all that AI stuff built in and a lot of that

i think is just amazing tools and i can't wait to see what's next um but that said every everything that i've ever come across in life that has a propensity for good it's matched by It's propensity for evil. And I really feel that way strongly about, about AI and images. And it's, the problem is with people who are lazy. And maybe that's a little bit of a harsh way to say it. But I think that's also, you know, lazy in how we consume as well as participate. And from a philosophy standpoint, that's one of the things that scares me about the current and future generations is we're becoming consumers rather than participators and creators.

And I think that being a photographer today gives you the opportunity to keep creativity alive to contribute to that side. rather than just being a consumer. And AI is really caters to just the consumption of things. And yeah, it's going to be tough. It's neat that you could take a picture and have it sharper than what you technically could do. I see some of these tools, but I don't use a lot of those tools like Topaz. I don't use these things that make, you know, that take gaps in your photo. and clean it up and add stuff that isn't there.

Again, if you're doing it for art, I mean, I love Photoshop. I've made a lot of money creating art digitally in my life, and AI is just another way of doing that. But to say, but to do that and then say it's, it's an observation to use it in a technical standpoint, to say that this represents nature is dishonest. And I think that that's going to be a tough thing that we've got to figure out. in the future is how we curate, you know, what comes from, from AI. And so I'm hoping that more people getting out there and being aware of the world around

them will help them spot the differences and be more appreciative of the true painting with light and not just using our crappy base images as a prompt to AI to get a better image and get an AI generated image. But, hey, that's just me. And I'm an old guy, so stay off my lawn. Cool. Well, yeah, my brain is full, and I think this has been a really great conversation. Yeah, thank you.

And thanks for your expert advice and wisdom. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to diving in at some point here. I'll probably have to have a training session or two, you know, out in Texas this fall. Yeah, yeah. In the palencios. Yeah, right. Yeah. There you go.

Yeah. But, yeah. So you, I guess maybe put it out there again. People can find you at parrot reptiles. Yeah, parrot reptiles and Jordan Parrot on both Instagram and Facebook. Gotcha. And what was your website again? I've got phonotography, but it's.

It's stale. I don't even know what I've got up there right now. So I think I'm going to resurrect it here in the coming weeks, but I've got to get through the Daytona show coming up here. If anyone's, I don't know if this will air before the show hits, but I'd love to see anyone who's dropping by, come by the table, say hello. I recommended that Alex come say hi to you. I dropped him the line and said, good job on the show.

Go see Jordan at Daytona. So if Alex. up and introduces himself, you'll know why. Cool. Well, that's, yeah, I wish I could make it out there. That'd be a fun show. I think, yeah, Keith, Keith is usually at Daytona. Yeah, Keith's going on.

Craig, and we've got Craig's Planet Snake Tune shirts that he's got there and worked with him on those. And I've got a bunch of friends coming. So it's going to be an exciting, you know, for me, that show is social. I do two shows, one or two shows a year. And, and it's really, it's not about selling snakes at all. I mean, I just, I love hanging out with friends and getting an opportunity to do that where I'm not crawling up a canyon. Right. Yeah, you got to do a show here and there just to ground ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good stuff. And Daytona's a good one to do it. Yeah. It is. Yeah. I guess I've only been once, so I need to rectify that in the coming years. but yeah absolutely come on out yeah cool man well thanks again for doing this and uh we'll

we'll thank the mpr umbrella for hosting us and eric and all the work he does and and we'll catch you again next time for reptile fight club