I want to make some sort of enclosure to take photos of my snakes, but don’t know where to start. It would be for sand boas and young corn snakes. Any ideas or suggestions?
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For optimal photo quality, you would want a box with white-colored sides to reflect lights, with circle lights or some other light to shine into the box with the snake inside.
Are you talking a full setup beautiful naturalistic bioactive enclosure type, or just somewhere to take some clean photos of the snake only like described above? In other words, are you wanting to boast photos of your snake in an “environment” or just the plain snake? 
I hope that made sense.
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A lightbox is what you are looking for. It doesn’t have to be all that fancy. Here’s one I have and use to take still photos of the tobacco pipes I make and sell:
And here’s a sample of the results (and I’m not very good at photography):
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I see people have already suggested light boxes but if your just wanting to try something cheap to start off with to see if it works you can make your own DIY light box and line it with paper and choose which color works best black ,white etc. That’s what I ended up doing to save money at the time and still have decent photos. But they have really nice light boxes out there for sale as well
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Great point. A homemade light box isn’t all that difficult to make. You could easily rig up one with posterboard the color of your choice and a decent light with a daylight bulb. Cellphone cameras are so good these days you could take pretty good pictures with it instead of a professional camera.
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Looking for somewhere to photograph just the snake, maybe with a branch or something, but just to get a good photo of the snake.
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I would prefer to make one myself, mostly for the cost. My cellphone does take pretty good pictures. Need something inexpensive that will contain my snakes (the corn snakes are quick little buggers) so my hands are free. Is it possible to shoot through glass without problems with reflection or glare? Maybe modify an aquarium?
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Nice photo. It really shows off your work.
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Yep, I was away for a bit but see that everyone has already given some pretty good ideas. A homemade lightbox would be your best bet.
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It would be possible to shoot pictures through glass, but that glass would need to be pretty high-quality to avoid smears, glare, focusing problems with your camera, etc.
If you needed to contain your snake temporarily but still get good pictures, a way to go around the glass is to simply cut a hole large enough for your hand/camera to slip through. This way, you can keep your snake in the box long enough to take photos, but not have blur or smears in the photo. Hope this helps
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Yea it’s hard to beat the pictures the smart phones will take now unless someone has thousands for a good camera setup
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I made a simple light out of a cardboard box and white copy paper. It worked really well for my purposes which was photographing Willow when I first got her. I did not use my iPhone but my canon.
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That’s a nice photo of Willow. She’s a pretty snake.
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It is really hard to capture but her eyes are pale blue/gray, and thank you, I love her.
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