We’ve had a couple of overnight frosts and some generally cool days, and I figured the treefrogs had packed it in for the winter, though the aquatic frogs in the backyard pond might still be sporadically active. Recently a warm front pushed in, bringing quite nice temperatures and a bit of rain, and last night I went out in just a t-shirt (well, okay, pants too) to take a peek in the backyard. As suspected, a couple of the green frogs (Lithobates clamitans) were out of the pond and both resting, a few meters apart, on the lower crossbar of the fence.
Both of these are fairly good-sized for the species, so they’ve been doing well in the pond, and they’re far from the only residents – I’ve known of five at a time in there, and last night I saw four of them, one unidentified species being quite small. I was walking very slowly and carefully because the yard is littered with leaves and spotting frogs in those conditions is extremely difficult.
But they weren’t the only frogs to be found, and the next ones surprised me.
My count for last night was six green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea,) of different sizes, all in the backyard. I’d been hoping, only a few months ago, to get some established in the yard, but this was more than expected, especially since they’ve outnumbered the Copes grey treefrogs at the best of times.
When I first saw this one, on my way back in to get the camera, it was tightrope-walking up the black pole you see here, a peculiar sight since their legs are twice as long as they normally appear, splayed out awkwardly to either side. I will get an illustrating shot of it one of these days, but for now we have the typical perches.
I spotted this one from across the yard as I was photographing the previous – that bright hue certainly stood out against the gardenia leaves. This was also noticeably the biggest.
You’ve seen a variation of this perspective before, and it’s possible this is the same frog, but it’s a different downspout. This one was the most difficult to photograph, since the space between the nearby rain barrel and the porch supports was very narrow, and I simply couldn’t work a better angle with the flash unit. This was also the only one to be found at midday today, right before I typed this.
This was actually the first I’d spotted, the one that made me head back to get the camera, and I found three more in that short trip. The blue ‘pole’ is actually a standard network cable, the kind you plug into the back of your computer, or at least did – now everyone uses their smutphones, it seems. but yeah, tiny. In fact, here’s another shot to show scale:
Yep, able to fit comfortably on the pad of my middle finger, though I doubt it would have stayed put for those shenanigans.
This was the last, about the same size as the previous one and hanging on a dried stem in the garden. The warm rain really made them active last night, and might again tonight – who knows? But I’m pleased to see them again when the shooting season is winding down for the winter.
And to close, we return to the first treefrog in the gallery which, while I was shooting the others, crossed the upper deck to sit on the edge of the window and peer into the screened porch like a slimy green voyeur. I said I was wearing pants, so I can’t tell you what was motivating this one, and let you speculate on your own.
Meanwhile, I present another image with a curious effect, but I have to admit this isn’t the best way of presenting it. It should be casually inserted into a gallery of other images without comment, letting people skim over it if they’re so inclined, waiting to see how many people catch the peculiarity of it. All I will tell you is that there is no trickery involved.
Several of the things I talk about in the ‘cast are illustrated within this one image, such as simplicity, point of focus (strong subject,) creating a scene, keeping the subject off-center, and framing to keep whole elements such as the boardwalk and the railed overlook. The overlook balances out the lighthouse, while the curve of the boardwalk helps direct our attention towards the subject, inviting us to come along. Also notice both the light quality/color and the angle, shaping the lighthouse and telling us it’s morning there; not only that, but both the overlook and the lighthouse are facing into the light, a subtly positive mood. A couple of clouds in the sky help fill in a large blank space, and the grasses tell us it’s a rustic setting – which is kind-of true. The lighthouse itself and the immediately-surrounding grounds are immaculately tended, but overall the locale is marshlands, which is more interesting and expressive, thus the “you choose what you want to portray” bit. Rule of thirds? Not really, but not far away – in other words, the concept is okay, but the mathematical precision so often given to the rule is completely unnecessary and not at all grounded in fact. if you want further detail about this, I’ve tackled it no less than three times: 
And this is how you do it wrong – yes, I really did take this photo, at a time when I should have known better, and my only defense was shooting from a car window and anticipating the crane leaving the area before I could get off many frames. But look at how complicated and distracting the background details are, and how centered the crane is, and then the trash in the photo, and holy shit, the pole sticking right smack out of the top of the crane’s head! Seriously, do better than this (it’s not hard.)
Now here are more illustrations of things I talked about, such as setting the point-of-focus against a contrasting color in the background, while also using the background to build a frame around the focal point. The soft light allows for the subtleties of the flowers (even when it produces a truly boring sky, which is why it’s minimized in this frame,) but the larger version show the raindrops on the blossoms much more distinctly, so the grey conditions become more understandable. The single flower is set apart from all of the others so our eyes go right there, assisted by the shorter focus range, but the background is still expressive and distinct; this is not a photo of a flower, but of a particular scene, and anyone at all familiar with UNC Chapel Hill recognizes Old Well instantly. Moreover, other distracting and unwanted elements are hidden behind the flowers by shooting at a low angle. It’s easy to shoot a landmark and just have a photo of a landmark, but with only a smidgen more effort, you can add a lot of charm to the scene.
Here we see why high-contrast light doesn’t work for high-contrast subjects. The head of the kid becomes so indistinct that it’s impossible to tell where it stops and the shadow begins, and while there’s the faintest hint of a sheen from the black fur on its shoulder, it drops almost entirely into the bottom registers of the image, even while the white coat has bleached out to indistinct pure white in most places – it illustrates the narrow range quite well. Adjusting exposure for either aspect would have driven the opposing aspect even further out of range, so no matter what, we would have to pick which portion of the goats we simply didn’t want to see the detail of – or choose better light conditions to shoot within. I personally have three different presets on my cameras: an ‘average’ setting with mid-range contrast and saturation, then one with reduced contrast and saturation, and one going the opposite way with increased settings. The one with reduced contrast and saturation is for use in high-contrast lighting such as this, helping to control these extremes, while the increased contrast/saturation preset is for use when the light is low-contrast and muted, making the colors pop a bit better.
Some of these are relatively recent, some of them are much older, but all of them are fantastic! No need to exercise your own judgment – I’ll just go ahead and provide your own opinion to you, because you obviously need it.
The image above is once again solely the blue channel, and this is somewhat typical of the results when using just blue – it tends to be the darkest, or at least it does for most of the images I shoot, anyway. It can also go pretty muddy at times, producing blotches in gradient areas, but this time around it came up sharp – this just might be a trait of the lenses I’ve used (all lenses bend different wavelengths of light by different amounts, and while some of them are good at correcting this within the lens array, not all of them are.) Regardless, the snail shell attracts attention while the head of the snail becomes much more subtle, and the whole thing gets moody. When Hollywood finally gets around to doing a film about a pathologically murderous snail, this image is here to guide them in producing the necessary ominous effect.
You can see a color version of this pic 
Of course, I couldn’t pass up my typical (actually, pretty trite by now) approach to colors when they’re scarce, this time in Mason Farm – I just liked the way the light angle was shadowing the leaf while still providing some backlight glow. Since this was before we had headed out to the colorful nature trails, I was working hard to produce something of interest for the outing – even though I already had a few images that will be highlighted towards the end of the post. You know how drama goes.
What I had also forgotten was that the recorder has a tendency to simply drop out at times, not even producing a gap or silence but just deleting a section of audio (more than a few seconds at a time) without even a telltale click – just this abrupt jump in the sentence to something later on. That’s kind of hard to deal with, requiring re-recording of at least some sections, and if you’ve never attempted this, matching voice quality and intonations can be pretty hard, especially if you suffer from winter sinus issues. Not really an ideal situation. I am still playing with options, so we’ll see where this leads.
Another example is this American sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) at the same location, a lone tree among a lot of greenery that showed off a patchwork quilt of colors all by itself. A broader landscape shot would only have diminished the impact of the colors and would hardly have expressed “fall” in any significant way, so going in close was necessary to bring the impact of the contrasting colors. The sweetgum, and a couple varieties of maple, seem to be the only species in the area that develop vivid reds before shedding the leaves, but I could be wrong about that – identifying trees has never been my strong point. Mostly, what we see are yellows and browns, so fall colors tend to still be almost monochromatic until we stumble upon one of the more colorful trees.
The other trait is, such ground cover can make it really hard to spot venomous snakes that have chosen to sprawl where one is walking. This image doesn’t exactly illustrate this, because this one is not at all hard to spot and also isn’t venomous: this is a black rat snake (presently Pantherophis obsoletus) that’s just shy of a meter in length. Paths are slightly more attractive to snakes at this time of year because they often present regions of low grasses or undergrowth and thus more exposed to the sun, which is important to ectothermic species when the nights gets much cooler; sidewalks and asphalt roads are more attractive still. So when it comes to species like 
The patch of sunlight certainly helped me spot this next one, which was holding perfectly still well off the trail. It can be easy to find eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) at this time of year because they can make a racket, relatively speaking at least, plowing through the dry leaves, but when holding still they’re better camouflaged by those same leaves. The ‘bump on a log’ with its distinctive shadow was enough to gain my attention, and I once again maneuvered around to go in for the portrait shot; the only indication from this one that it even realized I was there was to draw its head back a little when I got very close. Turtles can bite of course, and tend to have much stronger jaws than snakes, but it’s not among their first choices of defense so the risk was nonexistent, especially since I remained out of range.
