A quickie here, before I have to leave. This is just to show how fast I can do a post. Of course, it doesn’t show anything of the sort, because posting times aren’t included and you have no idea when I started, but let’s just say that it’s 1:20 PM right now and I have to leave at 1:50. But the pics are already taken and resized, so…
Remember when I commented that the green treefrogs seem to be the first out, back on that post where I featured the first green treefrog, and then said the grey treefrogs seem to follow later on? Of course you do, no reason to provide a link back to a post just a few days old. Well, this afternoon the first Copes grey treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis) made its appearance in the yard.
Well, I say “yard,” but true to form, this one didn’t want to be found on anything natural-looking either, instead choosing a vinyl-encased barrel (part of a mosquito control system that I have yet to fire up) right next to the unnaturally blue rainbarrel that forms the background of too many images here. Seriously, guys, you could make my life a little easier. I’m providing you all of this exposure…
[Ha ha ha, get it? Not just exposure like, you know, photographic exposure light levels and all that, but the kind of ‘marketing’ exposure that so many yahoos think they can provide to photographers in lieu of actual money. My humor rides on so many levels.]
To illustrate (because wasn’t I just talking about that?) I provide some more images, real quick now.
I backed off a little and fired off a couple of shots of its hidey-hole. For the first, I shot just natural light, which is adequate but makes the treefrog a little subtle, and for the second I popped the flash to fill in the shadows a bit – not full strength, and to be forthright with you, getting the light levels correct in such scenarios is pretty tricky, in no small part because trusting the LCD on the back of the camera, especially when in bright sunlight or total darkness, is a stupid thing to do. You can a) spend some time getting light levels with a meter and doing some quick calculations, b) fire off several shots at varying power levels to choose the best later on after unloading the card, or c) wing it with a guess, which is what I did here. Not the best or most accurate of options, but again, time was short, and anyway here we are. I’ll take credit for my awesome experience and photographic prowess anyway, because that’s the kind of guy I am.
Regardless, for a quickie post, it also shows how fill flash works and what it can do for the image. I find this slightly amusing in itself, because I’ve spent a lot of time in the past working on illustrating images for posts and pages, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, and this one just fell together. I’ll credit this to experience too.
It’s 1:40, by the way…