It is easy to mistake it for an ordinary lizard, but New Zealand's tuatara is a creature like no other. This placid reptile has changed little from its ancestors, which lived more than 200 million years ago. Truly a living fossil, the tuatara predates all dinosaurs--and it has outlived them all as well. Today tuataras occur only in New Zealand, where land mammals never evolved. After non-native mammals such as cats and rats were introduced by humans, the tuatara's numbers plummeted and now they only survive on a few outlying islands. I joined a group of researchers working on one tiny islet and one afternoon the release of a tuatara that had been analyzed in their field lab gave me the opportunity to create a striking portrait.
I wanted to create an image that captured a sense of the tuatara’s ancient lineage. I got low and close in front of it with an 18mm wide-angle lens which exaggerated its size. The light was challenging, but my Nikon strobe helped transform a dull situation into a dramatic setting. I encased it in a small soft box and held it off to the side. This created a striking cross light, which brought out the reptile's texture. I adjusted the strobe from a standard TTL mode to a -1.7 setting. I knew that this would result in an underexposed tuatara, but I was intent on a mood of darkness even though the sun was still high in the sky. I evaluated the background light with my Nikon F100’s light meter set in a spot-metering mode and chose an exposure for the ambient light that matched the output of my strobe. The tuatara cooperated long enough for me to bracket through several exposure variations so that I could choose the best combination of fill flash and ambient light afterwards. In the ultimate frame the tuatara looked exactly as I had envisioned it--a creature frozen in time.
