A Failed Experiment...

I wanted to photograph more than just your average pet/pond animal, so I asked my friends if they have any kinds of quirky pets I could photograph. Most just had cats and dogs, but my friend Abbie said she had a snake. I went out to her house and we took the snake out of the tank and took it to the bathroom, where we put her in the bathtub and began taking pictures. I have no experience whatsoever when it comes to photographing snakes, and if I'm honest I didn't know what kind of photograph I wanted to achieve at the end either. 
I brought with me my 50mm Nikkor lens, but I had great difficulty focusing it using AF for some reason, which I've experienced with that lens before. I switched it to MF but to no avail. I did manage to snap some pictures, but they weren't good enough in my opinion to do anything with.
The snake wriggled too much, and my lens wasn't focusing enough for me to capture it before it moved, which didn't help either me or my auto-focusing situation. Here are some of the failed pictures I took:

I did however manage to get a couple of good shots, where the snake sat still while and my camera focused on it.

Despite being unhappy with the results of my shoot, we had to end it quicker than wished because the snake begun defecating, and so we had to quickly put her back in the tank so as to not get it all over the nice clean bath... I went home that day and decided I was going to give editing the shots a go. I was still thinking of ideas as to how I could edit it, but I wasn't sure if this was a shoot I was going to follow through with purely because I wasn't happy with the shots. I figured it was worth me at least trying to do something with it, or else it was just a wasted shoot.
I opened up my image manipulation software, and started selecting around the snake. Once I had selected a section of it I went into colours > colourise, and played around with the hues, saturation and vibrancy. I repeated this step a few times, gaining different colours with each step until I got a bit bored of the outcome. 
As you can see it's not one of my best images. I gave up with it before I'd even finished, because I knew I wasn't going to use it as a contribution to my final piece.

I also cropped the image, and played around with the hues again, but I was still unhappy with the results. I thought my editing in this wasn't at all playful, and the outcome of the images is very simplistic and dull.

Here is a contact sheet for this experiment: