frog at night

[Cmoney05]

I love macro but dont have the gear yet so this is the closest ive gotten I thought this is a cool shot. i like that i got his face in focus for the most part but i belive he still lacks detail. what did i do right or wrong and what could i have done differently? I did not use a flash but i had a handheld light above the frog when the shot was taken.

Nikon D50
Nikkor 35mm
F 4.5
.40 sec
ISO 600

[gturner]

Hate to sound rude, but that image is not doing much.
It is underexposed, no detail in the image other than showing that there is a frog in dim light on a ledge.

You need to get closer or crop it much tighter to make it interesting. Also some more light and more colour.
If you have teh raw file, up the exposure, drop the temperature, up the contrast and crop it much tighter, in landscape I would say

[Cmoney05]

Thank you for your honesty! im still very new to everything so i tried editing a little bit.. unfortunetly his nose is still a bit blurry but hows the change?

[mrteacherdude]

You have a better crop now as far as getting rid of much of the space around the frog that is not really contributing to the photo. I might suggest you recrop the original however to uncenter the frog or even go with a tighter crop. To me the frog looks like his face is too close to the lower left corner of the frame and in my mind I'm trying to push it up and to the right a bit. But that's just me and other's will no doubt see it differently. The blurry background to the right and above the little guy is still a bit distracting, and the bright area above it is tending to pull my eye away from the frog.

It looks like you got good focus on the eyes, but the blurriness at the tip of his rostrum and behind his head is due primarily to shallow DOF (depth of field). I'm not entirely sure as I don't have enough experience or technical knowledge about this, but based on my observations in my own photos, I'm thinking that some of the blurriness you are seeing is also due to a lack of light to help bring more of the edges into focus in the shadows.

If you use a flash for fill, probably powered down a couple of steps, that would help significantly with the lack of light and you could probably decrease your aperture (higher number that is) to get better DOF. You might also have to decrease the ISO to keep the photo from getting blown out.

Personally, if I can get away without using a flash or extra light for shots like this, I try to, but it's tough. I tend to like the "mood" that is present in these kinds of photos because that is the way I am seeing it by just being there. That is, I'm not seeing a brightly lit frog while it is sitting on the window sill, so I'm hesitant about making it bright unless I'm just documenting what kind of frog was in that particular area and I'm not worried about capturing the ambiance in some way. I've had some success with increasing the light on night creatures by simply wearing an LED headlamp and aiming it on the animal while I shoot without the flash. I have one that I can adjust the intensity of the light, which allows me to play around with different amounts of light and different camera settings until I get what I want.

I hope I'm not steering you a wrong direction here.