Turtle Photo Gallery

The original Turtle Times Photo Contest ran for over a decade, with monthly winners between 2000 and the mid-2010s. Hundreds of keepers submitted shots of their turtles and tortoises — basking, eating, hatching, growing up — and the archive grew into one of the best collections of pet-turtle photography on the open web. When the old contest software became unmaintainable, the original archive went with it.

This page is the rebuild — the curated photo gallery that takes its place. We organise photos by species, by behaviour, and by life-stage, and we continue to add reader-submitted shots when keepers send them in.

If you came here from a bookmark to /PhotoContest/, /photo_galleries.htm or one of the dated contest URLs, welcome — this is the right destination.

How to use this gallery

We don’t host a contest any more — the operational overhead was significant and we’d rather spend the time writing care guides. Photos on the site now serve three purposes:

  • Species identification — matched to the species page they belong on, with captions noting carapace pattern, age and sex where known.
  • Behaviour and husbandry illustration — basking poses, feeding, mating, brumation, defensive musk reflex. These photos do work that prose can’t.
  • Setup inspiration — reader tanks and outdoor ponds, captioned with the dimensions and equipment used. Useful for first-time keepers planning their own setups.

The full library lives at our species pages. The links below get you to the right one for each common pet species.

Aquatic species photo collections

  • Painted turtles — classic red, yellow and olive shell patterns; juvenile to adult progression.
  • Red-eared sliders — the most-photographed pet turtle; striking head patches and shell variation.
  • Cooter turtles — including the Florida red-bellied with its dramatic underside markings.
  • Musk turtles (stinkpots) — small but full of character; great for close-up photography.
  • Map turtles — the “contour line” carapace pattern that gives them their name.
  • Mud turtles — understated but elegant; good shots of burrowing behaviour.
  • Softshell turtles — pancake-flat profiles, long snorkel-like snouts.
  • Snake-necked turtles — the “heron-strike” hunting pose mid-feed is one of the best shots in the archive.
  • Spotted turtles — small, jet-black shell, yellow polka dots. Striking colour contrast.
  • Reeves turtles — an Asian species with subtle olive-grey shell tones.
  • Diamondback terrapin — ornate plastron patterns, brackish-water specialist.
  • Wood turtles — sculptural shell texture and orange limb markings.
  • Snapping turtles — powerful, intimidating, important for context shots showing size scale.

Tortoise photo collections

Tortoises photograph differently from aquatic species — dry, dusty, brightly-lit, often outdoors. The carapace texture is the main subject:

The mata mata — the strangest turtle of all

One species we’ll single out because the photos genuinely surprise people: the mata mata turtle (Chelus fimbriata) of South America. Triangular flat head, snorkel-like snout, fringed neck flaps that look like leaves. Wild specimens photographed from above blend perfectly into leaf-litter substrate. Our archive of mata mata photos is one of the better-curated bits of the site.

Behaviour photo collections

Particular behaviours that show up across species and are worth seeing photographed:

  • Basking behaviour — piled-on-platform shots showing how sliders, painteds and cooters share basking real estate, neck and limbs stretched fully out to expose maximum skin to the lamp.
  • Hunting strikes — the snake-neck and mata mata both hunt by ambush with a head-snap strike; mid-strike photos are dramatic.
  • Hatching sequence — egg pipping, yolk-sac visible, first wobble out of the egg. We have a particularly good set in our softshell egg incubation guide.
  • Mating — male-on-female mounting positions vary substantially between species; useful to keepers wondering whether behaviour they’re observing is aggression or courtship.
  • Shell shedding (scute shed) — normal in healthy aquatic turtles; we get a lot of “is this shell rot” emails from new keepers who haven’t seen a healthy scute shed before.

How to submit your own photos

We welcome reader-submitted photos for inclusion on the relevant species page. The process is straightforward:

  1. Send the photos to the contact form, mentioning “photo submission” in the subject.
  2. Tell us the species, the age of the animal (or your best guess), and where the photo was taken (your tank, outdoor pond, in the wild).
  3. Confirm you took the photo yourself and you’re happy for us to publish it credited to your handle.
  4. If you’d prefer no credit, mention that too.

We don’t pay for photo submissions and we don’t guarantee publication — we choose images that fit specific gaps in our species coverage. If you submit a great shot of, say, a juvenile yellow-bellied slider doing something interesting, the odds are very good it’ll go up.

Photo technical notes for keepers

If you’re trying to get good photos of your own turtles, a few things we’ve learnt over the years:

  • Get below the waterline. Top-down shots are boring. Lying on the floor with the camera against the side of the tank gives you the eye-level perspective that makes turtle photos come alive.
  • Shoot through clean glass. Algae and water-line residue ruin shots. A microfibre cloth and a few minutes before the shoot helps enormously.
  • Natural light beats flash. Aquatic turtles are reflective at the surface; flash hits the water and bounces. A bright window or moving the tank to the brightest spot of the room for an hour works better.
  • Patience pays. Turtles dive at sudden movement. Set up the camera, sit still for ten minutes, and they’ll resume normal behaviour. The best photos come from the fifteenth attempt after they’ve forgotten you’re there.
  • For tortoise photos, shoot outdoors mid-morning or late afternoon. The low-angle light catches shell texture beautifully; midday sun flattens everything.

Related on Turtle Times

— The Turtle Times team. Photo submissions and gallery questions via the contact form — flag “photo” in the subject line.

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