How to Photograph Herpetofauna

Photographing herpetofauna has its own special considerations when shooting in tropical rainforests. In this article, I will go through the various aspects of herpetofauna photography and discuss some of the challenges.

What is Herpetofauna?

Herpetofauna refers to all the animal species included in both the reptiles and amphibians categories, namely – snakes, frogs and toads, lizards and geckos, turtles, crocodiles etc. Although herps (short for herpetofauna) can be found in almost all types of habitats around the world, there are three broad types of geographical regions where their occurrence is more common that elsewhere – marshlands, deserts and tropical rainforests.

Needless to say that each of these habitat types has its own unique species and challenges. But for the sake of this article, I will only be concentrating on the tropical rainforests – mainly because that is where I captured most, if not all of my herp shots.

Herpetofauna Genre

The herpetofauna genre falls under the broad genre of wildlife photography. However, the subjects involved have a wide variation in size, ranging from tiny frogs / tadpoles to huge reptiles. As such, the actual photography technique may follow either wildlife photography or other genres like portrait or macro photography.