WATER LILIES AND FROGS

The other day I visited an undisclosed venue that prohibits photography shot there from being posted on the internet.  However, I am posting these photos because they are generic and not specific to the venue, which featured a number of ponds that were populated both with water lilies and with frogs.  I shot a few of each.

First the lilies.

There is nothing special in these images of water lilies, flowers that I have shot any number of times, and that may speak to my lack of creativity.  I did underexpose the shots some to bring out the definition in the flowers themselves.  Here is a third, which features a guest that I did not notice until post processing.

Speaking of frogs, here are a few more images devoted to them.

Ho hum.  I took this and all the other shots on this post with my workhorse 24-120mm lens.  It is apparent from the shot's angle that I was not at a great distance from the frog.  Even so, this shot required a good deal of cropping.  As did the following two shots.

My experience with photographing frogs has not been a particularly fortunate one.  They generally are very skittish and will leap away when I get anywhere close.  That was not true of these guys (or gals).  The frogs were only a few feet away and seemed relatively brazen in their indifference to my camera.  In reviewing the series of shots that I took, it is clear that I kept getting shots closer and closer.  This was about the closest that I got before these frogs had had enough.

One technical point on these last two shots:  They were both taken at a relatively narrow aperture of f/11, which should have produced good depth of field.  That seems more true of the first shot than the second.  In the second shot the frog's face is in good focus, but the legs are not.  I was not bothered by that, as I was most concerned about the frog's eyes.  The frog in the first shot seems to be in better focus throughout, but I think that is because it was taken in profile.

Finally, I spied the following tree limbs posed against the sky in a pattern that I found appealing in black and white.

John