Creepy Crawlers at Midnight

My property is currently under a snail invasion. I don't know if it is all the rain or what...but at night they are EVERYWHERE. Seriously, last night after midnight, my husband and I stopped counting when we reached 60...and that was just on and around my deck. They were on the deck, the house, hanging from the trees, covering our plants and bushes and all over in the mulch.

I thought it would be cool to grab my macro lens and a few flashlights and head out to photograph one. Easy right? Well, not really. They are slow creatures but they move A LOT. When you are photographing in such low light, you are forced to use a slow shutter speed. At about a half second shutter speed even the slow movement of these little guys showed up on film. So, I had to deal with that.

In addition, using my macro lens I had to get pretty much right on top of the little guys. Any small movement by me and they would tuck up into their shells and wouldn't come back out. This was hard to deal with because again, with such slow shutter speeds, I had to rest my lens on the deck right next to the snail.

So, my finished photo for me was a complete success!! It is actually a composite of two different photos (3 if you count the added texture). The depth of field was so shallow that I had to take one exposure with the shell in focus and another with his body in focus...the merge the two images.

Settings: Manual Mode, ISO 100, 1/5s, 3.8, two flashlights - one to the left lighting up the back of him, one to the right lighting up the front.