
This is a shot I've wanted to get for years....Today at the zoo, I was photographing merrily away, and a woman watching our pygmy rattlesnake announced, "Wow, the pygmy rattlesnake is rattling!" I changed lenses as I moved over to see, and sure enough, he was buzzing his tail on-and-off. Something was bugging him. He is an itty-bitty snake, this rattle is less than half an inch long, and I couldn't hear it.
For a long time I've envisioned shooting this with flash but a long exposure that would let the rattle blur out. I found the light in this exhibit was problematic--It wasn't terribly well lit. After a couple of failed tries, I found that dragging the shutter out to 1/40th of a second and cranking the ISO as far as it would go on my camera (ISO 1250) got a decent "ghost" of the shaking tail. Unfortunately, but the time I'd worked this out, the little guy had had enough, and instead of staying out and rattling, he crawled off where he couldn't be seen. So I only got this one shot. At 1/40th second, handheld (even though pretty well braced) it is not the clearest shot I've ever taken, but at least I got the shot!