P#8: A Photograph of a Red Eye Tree Frog Taken at Night

Red Eye Tree Frogs Are Great Animals to Photograph

Roy Toft: The fifth picture is another tight crop of a red eye tree frog, and this is an animal that's been photographed a lot. You see red eye tree frog pictures everywhere.

As you started out this interview, Audri, you talked about tiger pictures being taken mostly from in captivity.

It's kind of the same thing with red eye tree frogs. Ninety-nine percent of every red eye tree frog picture you see is a captive red eye tree frog. People raise them in captivity. Most of those are shot in someone's basement in an aquarium. (click the image for a larger version)

One of the interesting things about this photo is that it's a wild red eye tree frog.

We get to photograph these animals on my Costa Rica workshop. That to me makes this picture more real and more interesting.

A Black Background

Also what I like about this photo is just having the background go completely black. A lot of times when you see red eye tree frogs, they're perfectly lit and the backgrounds are green.

They're obviously shot in the daytime and that's because they're in captivity. You don't see red eye tree frogs in the daytime. You only see them naturally at night.

All my red eye tree frogs are shot at night because that's when you can see them in the wild.

By making the background go completely black here, it's just a very dramatic type of photo with the red and the green and the yellow, and then the black-black as the background.

This is obviously shot with a flash. I moved the flash off to the side and put a soft box on the flash to make it a little bit softer. It's another kind of portrait of a red eye tree frog that I like.

Audri Lanford: The composition is just phenomenal in this one. It's just so interesting. The lines are great, the eye is amazing.

Roy Toft: Thank you. Once again, you don't have to get the whole animal.

People are always obsessed with, "Oh, you have got to see the whole frog." Well, you know you don't. It's a red eye tree frog; we can guess the rest of this frog is probably green. This is the interesting part of the red eye tree frog.

In closing

This photograph of a red eye tree frog is taken in its natural habitat (rather than one raised in captivity) and is special for a number of reasons.

The tight cropping and composition again show you don't need to photograph the entire animal. And the black background is striking and shows the photograph was taken at night. Roy used flash creatively to capture this image of this red eye tree frog.