salamander shot. C&C appreciated.

[NJKILLSYOU]

thanks for looking.

 

[DScience]

Underexposed, out of focus. Try to correct that and repost.

 

[Overread]

Out of focus? How?

The shot is clearly in focus, though the depth of field (area of a shot in focus) is small, the shot is still focused correctly on the head of the salamander. If one looks at that tail it shows this clearly - an out of focus forground area of the tail, followed by an infocus section and then blurring again onto the main body in the background.

The glass is also giving a good reflection of the lizard as well.
What is clearly limiting is the lighting in this shot. I'm guessing that your on some 18-55mm or similar kit lens and that at f5.6 your shooting with your lens at its max aperture and also boosting your ISO to 400 to get more sensetivity to keep the shutter speed up. However the shot is still very dark and there is a lot of noise going on, which might be a sign that you have increased the brightness in editing possibly - only it looks very strong noise for ISO 400 even on a lower end camera.

That aside the best thing you can do to correct this is get more lighting into the scene (unless the lizzard has some light sensetivity problem which inhibits this). Two ways to approach this would be flash and reflectors or even a lighttent. Persaonlly you can already see the lizards reflective scales going that "wet slick" look and adding flash would just increase that effect - so I would approach by using a lightbox setup or just some basic reflectors. For a subject this size about as technical as you need to get is a few folds of white paper (yep that's it) for reflectors and if your going the lightent way again just simple white paper and nordinary spotlights/desklamp will work.

That will give you more light to work with to hopefully get abrighter overall picture - lower your ISO and hopefully get enough light to let you use a smaller aperture to get more of the lizard in the depth of field (that is if you want to).

Little specs on the glass are going to be common and your never going to get it prefectly clean so do use the spot heal tool and clone tools in editing to clean the glass up a little.
I've also done a little bit of this with insects (moths so less refletion problems so I used flash) and one idea might also be to set the glass on some stands and then have a relector shining light onto the understide of it. That would give a little lift of lighting to the underside of the salamander - losing some of those deep darks.

Its a neat idea for a shot and you have the basics all there - a few modifications (and of course the salamander which I assume is a pet though I might be wrong and this was a once off chance shot) and you can get a lot more out of it.