Thank you Scott.
He was unimpressed by me and my equipment:) I think this is less about curiosity and more about his best portrayal of a stick. He froze like that after I had chassed him back and forth a couple times. Then he sat like this for a few shots, then he was off again. The thing with these particular salamanders is they will secrete a boat load of slim as a defensive mechanism. If you try and handle them, you get it all over you, and then they pick up all kinds of debris. He had enough debris to start off, but had I pestered him, much more he would have started making a mess of the situation.