In the night Esme noticed the house gecko (Hemidactylus sp.) that has been living in our house for quite some time now, resting on the ceiling. I grabbed my Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-S600 digital camera and the wooden stool I use as a desk chair. The latter was required because our ceiling is very high.
At first I made two photos with flash on but this created very harsh shadows. Also I was afraid to scare away the little animal. After I had made several without flash I switched my digital camera to soft flash mode because I was afraid that the photos without flash would end up having a lot of noise.
The above photo was taken with the flash setting on the Cyber-Shot DSC-S600 set to '-'. The shadows are still too harsh but the photo nicely shows that the tail of the gecko is not smooth. And also that we really have to clean the ceiling...
After a few more photos the gecko suddenly ran away, a motion that looks like swiming. It halted on the wall, near to a corner. I made a few more photos and then decided to leave the little exterminator alone.
Our house guest often makes itself heard around 5 o'clock in the evening if there is little light in the house around that time and we are not near to it. Geckos make sounds (are vocal) and the sound of "our" gecko sounds sometimes like loud kissing noises and at other times like the cackling laugh of a little witch.
Furthermore we often hear it just before we turn of the light in the bedroom, or just after, like it's saying goodnight. Around that time it's often above my desk, hiding between the wooden beams, and often around that time it leaves a tell-tale sign on the surface of my desk: a little gecko dropping.
The animal is nocturnal, so we hear it now and then in the very early morning as well. And on rare occasions it walks on the ceiling close to the bed, and the sounds it makes manage to wake us up.
But both Esme and I like the little animal in our house because in the night it feasts on small insects we both don't want to have in our house like juvenile cockroaches.