Thursday 4 April 2013

Frog Blog - Part I

Spring is a great time for wildlife photographers and nature lovers alike as all of the animals are becoming active again, the flowers are beginning to bloom and new life is starting. This year I wanted to start Spring off with something which I haven't photographed before and I thought why not make it simple and go with the Common Frog...

I was lucky to go out in the first week of spring and within about 5 minutes I came across a corner of a pond full with Frog spawn, being closely guarded and nurtured by two adult frogs. Frogs can lay up to 4000 eggs and lay numerous batches each year. I'm always amazed  by how much one female can lay and enjoy looking closely at each egg and realising that there is a future frog in each one however on average only 5 out of 2000 tadpoles will survive to become adult frogs


I began photographing the frogs and chose to use my Canon 100mm L Macro lens. This was the top choice for me as the detail produced is fantastic, the minimum focus distance is 15cm so I was able to get very close to the subjects and also being able to go down to f2.8 allowed me to get some really nice shallow depth of field shots. 
Most of the time the frogs were under the water, probably because it is safer and they were nurturing the spawn, but they kept surfacing for air every other minute. This looked instantly like a great shot as only the head would come out of the water. The detail on the eyes was something I wanted to capture as well. I set my camera to auto focus and was holding it parallel to the waters surface (trying my best not to drop it) and I waited for one to surface. 
It was very hard as each time one came up by the time I focused in it would descend into the water again. I was patient however and managed to get some shots which I was really happy with. 





I was really happy with this photo but I think if I was to take it again I would have got closer to the water the be more level with the frog.











When I went back a couple of days later one of the frogs was out of the water which allowed me to get some different type of shots.





This particular frog, when out of the water, didn't seem phased by my presence at all. He allowed me to get extremely close and didn't move or even twitch. This allowed me to get some really cool close up images of the eye. For this photo below I was only around 20cm away with my lens, the photo isn't cropped in. 


















Thank you for taking your time to read this, please leave a comment of your thoughts. I am hoping to try and take some underwater photos of the frogs soon which should be fun and hopefully I will have some good results to show. 

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