I shot this frog during my semi-annual frog and reptile workshop in St. Louis. It is an Amazon milk frog. The leaf on which it's resting had beautiful venation, and I wanted to dramatize it with backlighting. I placed a ring flash behind the leaf with a cable connecting the camera and flash. The problem, though, was the frog became a silhouette. That actually wasn't bad, but this particular species has great color and texture. I wanted to show both -- the wonderful detail in the leaf and all the color and texture of the frog. So, I took a separate shot of the frog with the ring flash attached to a 50mm macro lens. In post-processing, I then selected the frog using the pen tool and pasted it onto the leaf. At the bottom of the layers palette (in Photoshop), I clicked on the fx icon and choose 'drop shadow' to add a small shadow around the frog. My settings for the frog were 1/200, f/32, 640 ISO. I used manual exposure mode, and the ring flash was set to ETTL (automatic exposure mode). The next frog and reptile workshop is this month on the 20th and 21st.
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