Go on a tour of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador and you’re bound to run into waves of Sally Lightfoot crabs. Thousands of them skitter along the shoreline and the red-and-yellow adults truly stand out on the black, volcanic rock. (Younger crabs are black, camouflaged against the rocks. Our guide explained that when they outgrow their predators, their coloration changes – it has nothing to do with them being poisonous.)

Sally Lightfoot crabs are one of the few animals in the Galapagos that are extremely shy. Walking among them on the rocks is like parting the Red Sea and without a telephoto lens, it can be nearly impossible to take a close-up like this. That’s why I’m so proud of this particular photo – it was taken with my Rebel’s stock 35-80mm lens.

It took a lot of patience, though. I picked out a particularly colorful crab and followed it around for almost 5 minutes, trying to get just this one picture. Only when the crab got tired of running and would settle down for a bit did I get an opportunity for a shot. I’d slowly lower the camera to the ground, beep-beep-beeping the auto focus and trying desperately to estimate the field of view without being able to look through the view finder.

Eventually, I snapped a shot and let the crab go on its way. When the 4” x 6” prints came back, I was disheartened to see that the only thing wrong was that the crab’s right legs were cropped off at the border. But that’s okay, because this was the photo that taught me that the automated development process always crops off a small portion of every negative! When I went to digitize the negative myself, I was able to salvage the photo by cropping all the way to the edge.