PDA

View Full Version : Cope's Gray Tree Frog - Natural camouflage



Randy Stout
06-29-2014, 10:01 AM
This fellow was imaged in my backyard yesterday. He was very hard to see until you were right on top of him.

D4 Sigma 180 f/3.5 f/13 ISO 640 1/15s

Post in LR and CS6. This was a three shot stack, my first go at this tech. I knew there was no way I could get enough DOF in a single shot.

Advice and comments always appreciated. There is so much detail in the original, that I really had to reduce the quality to get it within the limits of the site. Looks rather nicer when viewed quite large!

Cheers

Randy

Diane Miller
06-29-2014, 03:06 PM
What a camo job!! Nice find and looks like the stack worked well. Not easy to do outdoors.

John Robinson
06-29-2014, 06:36 PM
Great stack Randy Good fun it is too.
People dont realise that living things do stop "still" for long periods, There is something about the end results of stacking that hits you between the eyes.(when it works !!! )
John

Ron Conlon
06-30-2014, 06:08 PM
No wonder I have never been able to find one of these! I hear them all the time. My favorite learned tidbit is that these guys crawl under the leaf litter and freeze solid in the winter--haven't found a frogsicle either. I suppose once they freeze, lower temps don't make a difference, so I look forward to hearing them, and perhaps seeing one soon. I love the fact that there are tree frogs on this side of the lakes, it seems almost tropical. Never experienced them in Canada, don't know if their range extends that far.

I like the stack, shows it in its habitat so well. Need to learn to make stacks work for me without shelling out for additional software. Did you use the automatic stacking in PS, or did you auto-align and mask? I have not been happy with PS's automatic stacking, but don't know if I am not feeding it the right kind of files or whether it is better to make the choices manually. PS's automatic stacking seems not to select all of the in focus bits...

Excellent shot, excellent techs, tremendous interest.

Diane Miller
06-30-2014, 06:21 PM
The problem with PS (and probably some other stacking programs) is something I think is called "bloom." PS does a wonderful job of auto-align and auto mask, but when a shallow DOF results in some overlapping areas being much more OOF than the same area in other focus layers, the OOF parts will cause a smeared sort of area. Best results are with fairly small apertures and subjects that don't have a lot of depth. (Looking down into a hibiscus bloom would be very problematic.)

Zerene Stacker is extremely sophisticated and minimizes this problem, but is rather complex to use. The last time I tried Helicon Focus it was just as bad a PS. Haven't tried any others. But I've seen some wonderful stacks here, so others will chime in with their secrets, I hope...