Who doesn’t like the sound of frogs croaking on a warm, spring evening?
Just after a spring rain many of us can hear this tiny animal calling to their friends and especially calling out to find a new mate. It’s the kind of sound that can bring out the memories back to when we were kids and could hear them along the creeks we were exploring.
This is a pretty easy animal to find in the wild, so let’s find out more about these attractive subjects and learn how we can take better photographs of them.
Hi, this is Terry VanderHeiden, bringing you the Nature Photography podcast. In this episode of this nature photography series, we will work with Pacific Chorus frogs and learn some tricks to photographing them, how to find them and how to work with artificial light to create realistic scenes.
The tree frog that we are listening to here, is the Pacific Chorus frog, also known to many as the Pacific tree frog. This is considered to be one of the most plentiful amphibians on the west coast of North America. They can be found everywhere from Baha California to up into British Columbia and as far east as Montana.
While it is sometimes referred to as a “tree” frog, this little guy seldom ventures up trees, it will mostly stay near the ground. While his little suction cup feet can propel this frog on just about any surface, in shallow creeks and ponds are the home of choice, for this guy.
They can be found as either brown or green, depending on the background he’s living in. One of the keys to this frog’s survival is not being seen as easily, so the ability to change his own coloring is a big asset.
They are notable to have a dark mask that goes from the front of their faces, through the eye and partway down his body. They have suction cup feet and big voices.
When you find several of them making their tell tail “ri-bett” sound, it can almost be deafening when they all get going.
Finding these frogs is pretty easy. Go looking in the early evening in the spring time, anywhere from January to June depending on how cold it is in your area. Just go to an area that has some shallow water, be it a pond, creek, ditch or whatever and sit quietly and listen.
I enlisted the help of my good friend, fellow photographer and natural history enthusiast, David Bozsik. David has a fantastic web site with tons of great wildlife images at www. Bozsik Imagery.com I asked him to tell us a bit about “finding” the Pacific Chorus frog.
Once you have located a Pacific Chorus frog or any other frog for that matter, you are going to want to photograph it.
Since these are small animals, (one to two inches in length) you going to need to get out your macro lens.
This is a specialized lens that not everyone owns, but it really worth adding to your equipment list just for how versatile it really is.
Unlike your other lenses, this one lets you get really close to your subject, allowing you to focus on something that is only a few inches away from the front of your lens.
No other lens in your bag will allow you to photograph a landscape and then be able to focus down to fill up the frame with something as small as a US quarter.
The big trade-off on one of these lenses is that your depth of field can be really shallow, but there are some ways to get around that.
And when I say shallow, I mean really shallow. Imagine this, You are photographing the face of a penny. That penny fills up the frame of your viewfinder. When shooting at the maximum wide open f/stop, say, f/2.8, looking at the penny, Lincoln’s face could be in focus but the background where the words (In God We Trust) are out of focus. Just that tiny difference between the levels of the engraving will fall out of the depth-of-field area that’s in focus.
To combat this, we usually need to stop the lens down. Make the aperture smaller. Thereby letting less light through the lens.
Like in most photography situations, the first thing to think about is your light.
When you are working in Macro photography situations, you already have a very shallow, depth of field. The first thing you can do to give yourself more coverage on what’s in focus is by stopping down the lens. By this I mean instead of having your aperture at f2.8 you might need to go down to f/16, f/22 or even farther.
In order to do this, you will need lots of light to use a shutter speed that will let you handhold this highly magnified shot. Of course, your fall back is boosting your ISO but I always like to save that as a last resort since I know that too high of an ISO will degrade the quality of the final image.
While it’s tempting to shoot in bright sunlight, which should normally be plenty of light for this kind of work, I would lean toward an overcast day, where there still is a lot of light but the light that is there is much softer and not as harsh as the middle of the day kind of light.
If you haven’t done this type of photography before, do some testing with different light conditions but epically with subjects that aren’t going to move on you.
To start with I would look for a bottle cap. This is small and about the size of a very fat, Pacific Chorus frog. Set that bottle cap on some leaves, on the ground, or rest it on a sturdy plant. Try getting some shots of it, making sure that your depth of field covers both edges of the cap. Now, get closer and take some more. You should get to the point where you fill-up the frame with the bottle cap and it’s all in focus.
If you find your depth of field is still too shallow and you have your lens all the way stopped down, try moving back just a bit.
All lenses will have a breaking point so to speak. Even a high-end Macro lens will have a limit to how close you can focus. I like to know what that distance is and learn what those limitations are. Here is how I do it.
We are outside in my garden, I’m shooting with my Nikon D850 and a 100mm macro lens, also made by Nikon.
I’ve got a bottle cap set up resting on a leaf of a potato plant, to simulate the size of a Pacific Chorus frog. I have full overcast morning light and the wind is almost non-existent.
Just as a side note, when shooting close-up photos, wind, is NOT your friend. Even the slightest breeze can cause all kinds of havoc when you are trying to keep things in focus. There are enough other factors going on that you don’t need a breeze coming up and moving your subject around while you are trying to get a good focus with such a shallow depth of field.
I’ve set up my camera and lens and adjusted my ISO to shoot at f/45 at 1/500thof a second. The reason my shutter speed is so high is the same reasoning you boost your shutter speed while shooing with longer telephoto lenses. Magnification.
Magnification will magnify how much a subject is moving in your viewfinder. If you were shooing this bottle cap from 10 feet away, you wouldn’t even notice the movement of the plant leaves. However, from only a few inches away, even a slight movement will seem like the plant is moving at great speeds inside the viewfinder.
Remember to keep your shutter speed high to keep your images sharp.
My technique when I want full magnification is to the rack my lens out to as far as it can go, then I back it off by just a small amount. That way my macro lens’s focus is not maxed completely out. It’s close, but not completely to its maximum magnification.
Then, I slowly move the whole camera closer, until my subject comes into focus.
Its’ almost like a rocking motion where I am sitting here, just leaning forward from the torso, into the shot and shooting as soon as the front edge of the subject comes into focus.
I know I am getting the maximum magnification that my lens will allow and my aperture is giving me most all of my depth of field.
After I have checked these images out on the computer, where I can look at them nice and big, I’ve noticed a few things. Even though it seemed like we had lots of light on that overcast day, I had to shoot at ISO 3200.
That is pretty high and am starting to see some noise that is affecting the image quality. Also, I could only shoot things that were in the light. Overcast or not, I wasn’t able to shoot anything in the shadows.
As you can imagine, we don’t have too much control over where we are going to find our subjects, so this is limiting.
I guess I am going to have to bring along an electronic flash unit to get the results I want.
Alright, I am back outside. This time my camera is set to a shutter speed 1/250thof a second, the lens is set on f/45 and now my ISO is down to 200. This will give me a much cleaner image.
Since I know my flash is going to go off at least at 1/1000 of a second, I won’t have to concern myself too much with my shutter speed. It will stop the motion even at high magnification. I just need to make sure it syncs up with my camera, and in my case, that is set by the manufacture at 1/250thof second.
The strobe unit I am using is a Nikon SB800. They have newer models out, but this seems to work fine for this application.
A note about flash units. You can get many other inexpensive off-brand flash units but if you go with a unit that is manufactured by your camera maker, then it will be just easier to use. Since it is paired with your camera from the get-go.
I’ve set my flash on manual and set the power at 1/2 power.
I also like to use another technique of lowering the shutter speed to bring in more detail in the background.
When you are working with your flash and macro lens, try lowering the shutter speed. This is allowing you to brighten up the background. This technique is called dragging the shutter.
You can shoot as low as you want, but there will be point where the background will look smeared because of such a slow shutter speed. Just keep in mind that the flash is controlled by your aperture or f/stop and your shutter speed controls the tone of the background.
So now you know how to find a very popular subject in the Pacific chorus frog, and you have learned how to start using your macro lens for close up subjects. You also have dipped your toes into the fascinating world of using an electronic strobe unit with your close-up photography.
One trick to keep in mind is getting low.
You may very well be laying on the ground to photograph these animals in their environment. But getting low will give the viewer an interesting and different perspective on these little guys. If you get shots of them on a plant, that you are looking up at them, so much the better.
So, there is nothing stopping you from getting your own frog photographs so get out there and do it!