Fire salamander on the forest floor. Picardie, France.

When I was a little kid I had a toy fire salamander. It seemed like the coolest creature ever to walk the earth with its bright colors. I never imagined I’d just stumble upon it on the forest floor in France one day…

Last time I went looking for fire salamanders in the middle of the night I had only one flash with me and the photos missed a bit of fill light. This time I came better prepared. It’s still a challenge to work in pitch-black, but this photo shows much more of the salamander’s surroundings.

It’s important to me to show surroundings. I want you as a viewer to be able to learn something from an image, and providing this kind of context is a way to pack a little more information into it. Nature photos often lack this context because of the inherent difficulty in getting close to wildlife; they’re taken from a distance with telephoto or macro lenses, and the surroundings get cut from the view. However, if you can find a way to get very close, you can get wide even with small subjects like this fire salamander.

You may wonder why I didn’t just set up the scene during the day. That would certainly make things a lot easier, but fire salamanders are active only at night (or sometimes during day after heavy rain) and it would show from the salamander’s pose. It wouldn’t be sitting upright like this.