Frog workshop

My Frog and Reptile workshop is this weekend in Kansas City, so I thought I'd post a shot from a previous workshop. These are Amazon milk frogs, and I used a 50mm macro lens and a ring flash. The flash produces soft, diffused light similar to an overcast sky. The backgrounds I set up are out of focus foliage prints that offer a typical bokeh look behind the subjects, but for a variation I often replace that with tropical plant images from my files. Ultra soft backgrounds are effective in directing all our attention to the subject, and that's a nice look. But complete depth of field in which the environment becomes a significant part of the picture is also a good approach. Since our eyes never see shallow depth of field, this kind of composite actually is more accurate with respect to how we see a scene. My settings for the frogs were 1/160, f/32, and 400 ISO.