Got home from Gold's this morning and as I approached my front door, I caught a bit of movement near my feet. We've got hundreds of geckos and a dozen or so lizards that live on/around our house so that's not unusual, but when I looked down and spied the fairly-well-camouflaged critter, it wasn't a gecko or a lizard. My first instinct was to move it into the cover of the monkey grass so it didn't get eaten by a sharp-eyed jay, but after a few failed attempts at rescue, I dashed inside to get my camera.
Aperture: f/5.6Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 90.0 mm
Lens: 28-90 mm
Flash: None
White Balance: Auto
Pretty sure this is a young female Woodhouse's Toad, though it might be a male that doesn't have the dark throatpouch yet? Cute as a button, regardless. A tad more than an inch long from nose to rear. She sat still for a good five minutes and let me zoom in quite close--I didn't want to risk taking the time to change lenses, so even at 90mm, the lense was within six inches of her. Good thing the neighbors are kind of used to seeing me crawling around on my belly with a camera in front of my face. I really like the angle of this photo, even though the DOF blurs out the texture of her skin.
Here's another pic I took before I got down on my belly (same settings as above). Not as much DOF on this one, so you can see the texture of her skin. Very cool, IMO.She eventually lost patience and hopped into the tall grass under the bushes.
The blurring out of the texture of her skin has grown on me. I've had to come back and look at it a couple of times before I was 'comfortable' with it. I can't think of a better word than comfortable as it didn't make me uncomfortable. When I first saw it, I was drawn to the blur so I was doing the whole Dog - High Pitched Whistle - Furrowed Brow look
ReplyDeletePray tell, what is this DOF to which you keep referring?
ReplyDeleteDepth Of Field. It's an effect created by a zoomed lens that blurs the background. My lens was zoomed as much as it would go, and the subject was quite close to the lens, so the DOF is quite shallow on this.
ReplyDeleteIt looks to crawling from another dimension.
ReplyDeletePretty cool!
DOF does not only happen with a zoom lens or when a lens is zoomed in/out. Instead of me fumbling up the definition, here's a link with good info.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm