Marine iguana on lava

This primitive looking creature is a marine iguana from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. If I had put a small, miniature car or building on the lava in front of the reptile, this guy could easily have passed for Godzilla! Photographing black on black is just as tricky as shooting a white subject on snow -- the meter interprets the scene as middle gray. In other words, the black elements would become overexposed so they looked gray and not black. With today's meters and LCD screens, we can correct the exposure as we shoot. I took this picture with film in 1995, so to deal with the exposure issue I used a hand held incident light meter that produced a perfect exposure. My setting were unrecorded, but knowing how I used to shoot with my Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera, they were probably 1/250, f/8, and I used Fujichrome Provia 100 slide film for all my wildlife shooting back then.