I was at a pet show, sometimes in may of 2005 when I met this interesting guy who bred reptiles and insect such as mantis. He invited me to his home to see his pet collection. Once there, I spotted this gecko and zoomed my camera just to take a casual snap shot of it sitting on drift log, somewhere in his pet room. In the meantime, he brought this mantis to show me, it was sitting on the palm of his hand. I turned around and tried to reach for the mantis to see if he was willing to come and sit on my hand and this is when he jumped and sat on the gecko, hugging him around the neck.
My new friend panicked and reached for the mantis when I asked him to stop and I offered to pay him whatever he wanted for the mantis if things went wrong. I took three shots in a row and when I tried to look at the LCD display, I heard him cry. I looked up and the gecko was no longer on the log. He pointed me to mantis that he literally pulled from the geckos mouth! .
The main lighting for the shot comes from a florescent ceiling lamp and the blue light is from a UV heating lamp he was keeping close to the floor.
There where quite a few distractions in the background, So I re
shot the background and replaced it with this.