Tuesday, August 2, 2016

shedding skin


Yesterday, Alice found a shed snakeskin under a tree near the front door - I brought it in; all paper-white, translucent; fragile.  I've been wondering all day how to photograph it to bring out this fragility.  In the end, I put it on a white board, and, yes, used flash.  The top image brings out its almost not-there-ness surprisingly well.

But also, without flash, and then using Photoshop to make the white board as white as possible, a strange thing happened: it was as though I'd restored some snakiness to the skin, and one can see something like the snake's probable colors coming out. 

All the same, I'm not there yet ... I may try again with natural light tomorrow.  It's an extraordinary and beautiful thing (and I wish I'd seen it happening - how long does it take a snake to get rid of its old skin?).


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