As promised, I am back to reveal where the frogs are, but just in case you’re late to the game and haven’t seen the original challenge, it can be found here, while the remainder of this post will continue below the fold.
So, the first bit of trivia regarding these photos is, there are actually two frogs in each; this wasn’t planned, it just happened that way, but I couldn’t pass that up, could I? It’s even reflected, in a subtly snarky way, in the post tag that reads, “it’s always in the last place you look.” The old joke is, of course it is, because when you find it, you stop looking. But if you had stopped looking when you found the first frog, you might well have missed the second. Nature photography is like that; if you stop paying attention once you’ve found a compelling subject, you might miss others.
Here are the two images with the frogs highlighted, and again, clicking on the photo will take you to the higher-resolution version (which is not highlighted.)
Like I said, not too hard. The other was much trickier.
Whoa, look at that sneaky little bastard trying to hide behind the stalk. Worked pretty well, too. But if you know my approach to photography and framing by now, you might have found them easily, because both images hew pretty close to the rule of thirds, despite my open denigration of the concept – it can still be useful in a composition, it just shouldn’t be considered too important, and mathematical precision falls way behind using the entire setting to dictate the best framing.
Now, a second bit of trivia: in both images, I did not see the second frog when I was taking the photo, standing there on location, and only found them when I was back home and sorting the images. I suppose that’s pretty understandable with the second image, but considerably less so with the first. Note that these photos were taken at 73 and 80mm focal lengths respectively, thus a mild telephoto magnification, so they were a little more distant in person.
Much worse, however, is that the lower frog in the first image is the one I missed while shooting; I had spotted and framed the upper frog and failed to see the more prominent one. I have no excuse for this.