PAW - Blue Mountains Treefrog

[David Nelson]

This is a piccy I took a few months ago when I was still learning the 
ins and outs of the *ist D (and, for that matter, SLR photography on the 
whole!).
http://davidavid.whatsbeef.net/citropa.jpg
I'm a frogger BTW - I find that stomping around in swamps in the dark 
and wet, looking for my amphibian friends is a good way to spend an 
evening. I think this was my first frogging outing with the new camera.
The frog is the Blue Mountains Treefrog, Litoria citropa. One of us 
Sydney froggers' faves.
*ist D, tamron 90mm/2.5 + 2x TC, inbuilt flash.
Anyway, the image was rather underexposed, and WB was off (a bit of 
yellowish headtorch light got in there). The frog however was in the 
best pose of all my shots. I originally payed little attention to the 
pic, but eventually decided to see what I could do with it. Playing with 
the levels and hue/saturation I eventually got it so that the greens 
weren't yucky and yellow and overall cooled the image a bit. Also did 
some selective work on areas (eg. the green around the face) that got a 
bit excited by the exposure 'push processing' (correct term?). Possibly 
would have been even better in RAW (not to mention the ease with which 
you can play with RAW...)
There's another reason for posting this - I wanted to ask if you can get 
a nice *non-black* background readily in night shots. I've come to 
realise the power of this effect, and am thouroughly a convert. My next 
purchase is going to the the AF360fgz for which I'll make a bracket 
that'll hold it in a similar position to Mark Cassino's arrangement. I 
suppose that with backgrounds that aren't far off it'd be possible.
Just have to try it and see. One worry is that with a single light 
source the shadows will be fairly deep - but then having the flash close 
to the barrel of a long macro lens will also help remedy this.

P.S. Accidentally bought the eyepiece magnifier fb on ebay (-:

David