California Newts
Over the past two or three months, I’ve been obsessed with photographing newts. I was actively looking for them as I knew this was their breeding season, but I had never photographed them before and didn’t know what to expect when I found them.
I discovered a few swimming in a stream flowing into a nearby lake, and they were interesting to watch but hard to photograph. Amazingly, a few newts formed a mating ball almost as soon as I arrived and getting caught by a small current, I was able to get some images when their heads surfaced. Besides that moment, I was forced to look for newts on land.
When I eventually found one crawling through the undergrowth, I was stunned by how hard it was to photograph. For a start, I was using a macro lens with a large aperture, so keeping the newt’s eyes in focus as it moved around was a challenge. Secondly, there wasn’t a lot of light to begin with because I found it under the canopy of some trees. And finally, the newt was tiny, constantly crawling under leaves and branches.
A week later, I returned to the stream with my GoPro and a new plan. This time, I submerged the GoPro underwater on the end of a long selfie stick. I quickly learned that I couldn’t control it from my phone when submerged, so I had to activate it with a ten-second timer and then move into place. That was tricky because I had to maneuver it into position without scaring the newts away, but when I looked at the images later, I uncovered a different issue. Anything closer to a foot away was severely out of focus.
On my third trip to the lake, I came equipped with a macro lens for the GoPro. This camera allowed me to get much more intimate photos of the newts, but it was impossible to judge the distance precisely when I was shooting blind, so I set the camera to shoot bursts of ten images at a time, moving the GoPro slightly and hoping to get something in focus. This worked much better, and while it was still a case of shooting 700 images and keeping five percent, I’d finally found a technique that worked.
On my fourth and final visit to the lake, I decided to walk further and see if I could uncover another location for newts. Not only did I find two additional places, but one was deep in the woods, where it was quiet, and with much more direct sunlight on the water, I could take more successful images. As it happens, California newts (Taricha torosa) and rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) are almost identical, but once you learn what to look for (the color around the eye and the shape of their head), it becomes easier to tell them apart, and I found some of them, too.
