Snail

Today at the grove I had in mind Beth's challenge for the nature and wildlife group so it had to be something that I had not blipped before. I have covered a lot of creatures since I started blipping ten weeks ago, but two blatant groups not so far covered are beetles and snails.

The grove and indeed Indonesia is plagued by snails. Every morning as I creep around the grove, I hear the occasional ominous crunch of another snail going to that great cabbage patch in the sky, so I figured that I owed the snail population fifteen seconds of blip fame for all the carnage that I had caused.

An easy subject I thought, well I thought wrong. First off, to make the snail look interesting, you have to get down and dirty. We all know what a snail looks like from above, so I wanted to get into the snails face and show a different perspective.

Yes, snails move slow, but it is amazing how fast they get out of position, forcing you to move yet again, so that your knee bone can find a fresh stone to bruise on. "well just move it back" I hear you say. I tried that, but then you have to twiddle your thumbs for ten minutes, waiting for him to re-appear from his shell.

Fortunately I took some flash shots in the session, as the natural light just did not bring out the unexpected textures and the sliminess of the snail, if you don't portray the slime then you have missed the whole point of blipping a snail. It would have been really embarrassing to have to go back to the grove to re-shoot because the first batch were failures.

The snails can get quite big here. This particular fella had a shell 3.5" in length and its body was 5.5" long when on the move (I carry a steel rule with me now). In Euphemistic terms, you would only need four for a decent stir fry.

As promised, a video of the August September rejects, October is now uploaded.

Dave