Pond Life

I worked from home on Friday and during a break in the garden I noticed that some frogs have moved in to our tiny pond.
Having more time today, I made a point of keeping an eye on the pond in the morning and evening as the light gets low enough to give some nice lighting.

There seems to be 5 frogs sharing the old bath (like I said, it's a _small_ pond!) at the moment. Even after only a day or so it's possible to see different behaviours in different frogs; some are much more relaxed about me being around than others. Obviously the frogs shown here are the relaxed ones.

I shot a few frames on Friday with the G9, and they're surprisingly good, but putting the 50mm macro on the 1D is definitely the way forward. I didn't forsee much use for Live View when I bought the camera, but it comes into its own for this sort of work.
The above was shot hand-held with the lens set at the minimum focusing distance, I used LiveView to frame and check focus by "racking" back and forward by hand until the eye was spot on at 10x magnification (the tripod plate on the bottom of my camera was in the water and I did wonder how waterproof the body is just in case..)

Sitting waiting for the frogs I noticed some of the other life that's in there too, in particular there were a few dragon flies that had hatched and were drying themselves out on the grass.


I quite like the graphic lines and flow that lead to the head, and it's a different take on the usual dragon-fly on grass shots that I've seen before.
Not the sort of thing I normally shoot but a pleasant way to spend a few hours in the sun.

There're a few more over at Flickr too.