These photographs of snails were inspired by the work by Ukrainian photographer Vyacheslav Mishchenko. I think he takes his photographs in the wild, but I decided to take mine using a tabletop set up in my garage.

It took a while to set up the stage for this shoot. I knew that I would use a water-filled grow bag tray from a garden centre to create interesting reflections. But the first problem I ran into was that the lip of the tray was visible, so I placed some sandstone-coloured rocks at the end to create a more naturalistic feel.

To create a colourful, out-of-focus background I placed some sweet peas about half-way along the tray and shot at a wide aperture (f/2.8).

The next problem was that the water reflection just looked black. I thought about adding watercolour paints or food colouring to the water but then realised that I could change the colour of the water by giving the water something to reflect. So I positioned a large blue piece of card at the end of the shot and this worked perfectly.

The final piece of set design was to give the snails something to perch on, so I added some lichen-covered sticks from the wood and some attractive stones brought back from a visit to the beach.

For lighting, I used a Godox AD200 flash in a large umbrella softbox. Most of these images are lit by flash only, though I did include ambient light in some images by using a slower shutter speed. Because the ambient light was coming from the rear of the garage, this added a nice rim light to the snail’s shell.

I’d collected four small snails and one large one. (We’ve had some heavy rain recently and it’s brought out snails that I discovered on my morning dog walk.) Most of the small snails were reluctant models and wouldn’t leave their shell but I found one who seemed to enjoy being in the limelight. I placed them (most land snails are hermaphrodites so I’m using the gender-neutral term) on an attractive stone and shot at a wide aperture (f/2.8) to emphasise their small scale. I focused on their head, but on closer inspection I noticed I was losing focus on the shell so for most of the subsequent photographs I changed my aperture to f/4-f/5.6.

I liked the reflection but I also thought it worth adding some water drops to the image just to see how it looked.

Another idea I wanted to explore was to place the snail on spiral-shaped objects, like a sea shell and a fern from the garden. I thought this would be a good way to emphasise the design of their shells. These images are OK but I wasn’t able to find any objects that were truly spiral, so I may need to come back to this idea in the future.

Finally, I introduced a larger snail. This added obvious parent/child storytelling possibilities but made it tricky to get everything in focus. One of these images with both snails is a composite (one image with the smaller snail in focus, the other image with the larger snail in focus). My Olympus camera has in-camera focus stacking but I couldn’t use it here because, believe it or not, snails actually move quite fast!

This was an enjoyable activity for a rainy day and I really like the colourful nature of the images. But I’m aware that the images can appear a bit twee (like my Tamed project). Maybe they would work well on a greeting card (if I can find someone who likes snails). That said, I do like the aesthetic, pictorial nature of the images.

After breaking down the set, I rewarded my subjects with green leaves and freed them in a local wood.