If you had asked me 4 years ago (before I started photographing) what I thought of garden snails, I would have launched into a vulgarity ridden tirade about their destructive nature and general “ickiness”.  Fast forward to last weekend, never in a million years would I have ever imagined myself spending 20 minutes trying to photograph a snail’s eyeball.

Yes- its true.  I did.  Not only that, I kept resetting my camera with every piece of macro equipment I own to try to capture it.  As it turns out, my trusty 100mm with an extension tube worked best.  I tried the 65mm with a ring flash, but was too close and manged to scare “him” back into his shell for 10 minutes.  The 100mm gave me enough distance to work, and allow him to eat.

I wasn’t able to capture an extreme macro of the snail’s eyeball, but I did discover they have teeth, and a lot more slime than I realized.