Spring Peeper

[Andrew McLachlan]

Had a few warm humid days lately that have really got the frogs chorusing rather loudly all night long. I spent a couple of hours seeking out some to photograph. They are harder to shoot now with the field grasses growing up in the ponds and more often than not the frogs are singing under the shelter of old dry grasses near the pond edge, but found this little guy and he was more than cooperative.

Lots of clean-up from flash generated specular highlights.

Nikon D200
Nikon 105mm micro lens
ISO100
f16 @ 1/60 sec.
SB400
flash on home-made bracket

93352

[Mitch Haimov]

Great pose this one gave you! And you nailed the sharpness on the eye. This is a winner. Looks like you made this image just before your subject went BOOM! :bg3:

[bhavya joshi]

Perfect Eye contact..nice angle Andrew.. You don't have horizontal image?? its better..:c3:

[Randy Stout]

Andrew:

The eye is great. Because the sac is so large and anterior, wish the DOF covered it a bit better.
With the D200, I would think you could go up a bit on the ISO to give more aperture flexibility.

I know it is always a trade off, and might have made the fg and bg more troublesome.

Did you focus on the eye? Might have been worth a few frames with focus point anterior to the eye to see if the distribution of DOF was better, eye and sac sharp.

Cheers

Randy

[OvidiuCavasdan]

Great pose and sharpness on the eye. Very nice capture.

[Roman Kurywczak]

Hey Andrew,
Part of me definitely want a bit more DOF.....but I still like this a lot as is! I do think you should fill in the LRC dark area......but this has a nice look to it!

[Andrew McLachlan]

Thanks folks for the comments, very much appreciated.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Andrew. OK - so these guys really CAN puff up that vocal sac more than your previous image showed!:t3 Like Mitch says, it looks like he's ready to explode! Great pose and a good job cleaning up flash-generated spectral highlights. I little more DOF on the sac would have been nice - but it's not a deal breaker. I would wish that the dried grass stem/blade wasn't touching the front of the sac, but there's not much you could have done about it in the field - and this is still a dramatic image. :S3:

[Andrew McLachlan]

Thanks Steve, much appreciated!