clarkinit:

In photography, not all things work, and not all things come together as they should. Last week during my “production day” (it’s really a whole week of no school, also called spring break), we set up the Phantom HD Gold to shoot a snake biting a mouse and eating it at 1000 FPS (frames per second). Not only did we have a setup, but we had the snake and mouse prepared to shoot. Above is the setup we had to catch the action in high speed, and we were lucky enough to find some random fake grass at Home Depot to put the animals on.

As you can see, the camera is pointed downwards towards the grass, with cardboard to make a corral. We managed to setup this camera to a laptop and monitor to shoot off-campus (which hasn’t really been done before with this camera at my school).

After we put the mouse and snake into the corral, we waited. Nothing happened. The snake sat there and the mouse was a little unconscious so he was busy making weird jerky patterns. Overall, the shoot and the reshoot were a bust because the animals were not cooperating at all.

Come to find out, snakes need time to adapt. Putting a snake in sunlight when he’s been in a cage most of his life while he eats was a bad idea. We needed to let the snake adapt to his surroundings for around a month so we can get him to strike.