A frog a day

Holy jumpin' amphibian batman!

It's been 3 days in a row that we've had frogs outside the dining room. First was the graceful tree frog from the last post, then yesterday was this Green-thighed frog:

And tonight was a tiny little Eastern Sedgefrog.


By the way, I find most of the critter names for this blog from one book, so I figure I should at least mention it. It's called Wildlife Of Greater Brisbane from the Australian Museum. John Passfield recommended it and it's been really helpful.

Anyway, sedge frogs are quite common and we hear them all the time, but this is the first time I've seen one.

More frog pictures

What do we have here? Another frog. The same one as last week?

It was in a really cool froggy pose tonight so I couldn't resist taking pictures. Here you go:

Wet Season

The wet season has begun here in Brisbane. Big showers yesterday and today have brought out the rain critters. That includes toads and frogs. Here's a Graceful Treefrog we saw this evening clinging to our dining room window. Sticky!

Leonard the Cane Toad

This is Leonard. He's a cane toad. He comes to say hi every night outside our dining room window, so I named him. We think he uses the light to hunt delicious crunchy Christmas beetles.

I know I'm not supposed to like cane toads because they're an invasive pest and they're dangerous to domestic animals but LOOK AT THIS FACE !

Love me

Blue Tongue Skink

Found this little fella in our garden yesterday so I started taking pictures. It almost looks like a chubby snake with little legs. Click on the picture to watch the video. You might even see his beautiful blue tongue...

First snake in a LONG time

I spotted this little fellow while we were having breakfast. It's a young green tree snake, like the one Clo saw last year on April fool's. It didn't stay very long, just passing through the garden. Green tree snakes are not venomous and don't even have fangs.

It's been over a year since we saw a snake in the wild so I was pretty stoked about this little guy.

Clo ... not so much.

Photo editing for beginners

Congrats to all the new photographers on completing your course. You'll no doubt have lots of things to practice so make sure you get out there and take some shots while it's still fresh in your mind.

When you come back and you're ready to put your pics up on your blog, take a moment to consider some simple photo editing to make those shots really stand out.

For many people "Photoshopping" is a bad word that involves making models skinnier and boobs bigger. But that's not what photo editing software was intended for. Just as a film photographer would spend some time in the dark room getting the right print, many consider photo editing as the "digital darkroom" where you can get the most out of your photos.

The other misconception is that it's really hard to learn, well that one is true ... Photoshop has a steep learning curve. That's why I recommend you use something simpler to get started.

Paint.NET is a great little free photo editing program for windows that allows you to do the basic adjustments without needing a 1000-page manual.

[Download it here]

Unfortunately, Paint.NET lacks a few basic plugins ... but that's OK, I wrote them just for you!

(Install this plugin set once you have installed Paint.NET)

Got everything installed? Good ... let's start!

There are a a few things that often need adjusting, so it's good to learn how to spot them and then apply the right correction in software.

1. Exposure - Maybe you didn't get your exposure settings just right, or maybe the scene tricked your camera into taking incorrect exposure. That's easy to fix. But spotting exposure errors is a little harder and takes some practice. I'll show you some examples of incorrect exposure.
   
   
   Overexposed (too light) Your camera took its exposure measurement on something dark in a bright scene.
   
   
   
   Underexposed (too dark) Your camera took its exposure measurement on something light in a dark scene
   
   
   Washed out colors (happens sometimes when shooting towards the sun)

Fixing exposure is usually just a question of brightness/contrast. But the standard Brightness/Contrast that comes with photo editing software is useless to fix photos. It will brightnen your blacks and make white hightlights look grey. That's where you need Levels adjustments. It's a like the Tide(tm) of brightness/Contrast; it keeps your whites white and your darks dark. It can be found under the "Adjustments" menu at the top of Paint.NET and it's called "Simple Levels..."

The basic idea is you want to make the most of the color curve in the middle (called a histogram). Notice the three arrows under the curve (black, grey and white), these are your adjustments. For an average scene, you want to drag the black cursor towards the right until it points to the beginning of the curve. Same with the white cursor (but moved left), or you can hit the "Auto" button. Then using the middle (grey) cursor, adjust your contrast without changing what's black and what's white. Go ahead, try it on the images above see how Levels adjustments can save a bad photo! Play around with all three cursors to get a good feel of what they do. And use the Preview tick box to get a quick before-after of your work.

Levels adjustments have saved this boring picture !

Sometimes an image will only have a gap on one side, not both, that's ok, you don't need to touch all three to fix an image, you don't even need to touch it all at if the exposure is correct. But get used to at least looking at the histogram when you're reviewing your pictures, you'll soon get an "eye" to spot which pictures actually need fixing.

2. White Balance - This one is easier to fix but harder to spot. When your camera takes a picture it tries to judge the color of the light. Light isn't always white, but our eye does a good job at adjusting to make it look white. Your camera tries to do this too, but doesn't always succeed. The color of the light also plays on how an image "feels" when you look at it. Skin tones look bad when the light is "cold" (blue tint) and make people look cold or sick. "Warm" (yellow) light on skin looks healthier and flattering. Using a flash often results in weird color tints as well. To correct these we go to the "Adjustments" menu again and select "Simple White Balance..."

Correction is just a matter of moving the temperature slider to make the image warmer or colder. (Try +0.25 to +0.30 on the example image above, remember to use the Preview tick box to preview changes as these may be subtle)

3. Sharpening - All images can benefit from a little bit of sharpening. Pros sharpen ALL their pictures before publishing. It can really help your photos stand out. Just remember to sharpen as the last step (after resizing), right before saving your final photo for posting. To sharpen in Paint.NET goto the "Effects" menu and select "Photo ..." then "Sharpen". A small value (1 to 5) should be enough to sharpen your picture without looking fake, no Preview tick box though, I didn't write this one :-(

Subtle difference, but the sharpened one below shows more detail around the eye.

That's the three main things I recommend doing everytime you work on a picture. Levels, White Balance and Sharpening. Once you get used to spotting errors, you can breeze through a dozen pictures in 5 minutes.

So there, more new things to practice. Have fun ... and lets see those pics!

Lorikeets, Guns ... and Roses

My first video with the new camera ... crazy birds!

(make sure sound is on)

Return of the Water Dragon

I've been seeing more and more of this little water dragon behind the house. I'd like to think it's the one we found last year in our garage and that's it's growing up nicely with all the delicious bugs that hang around those retaining wall boulders. I managed to get a few shots before it got spooked and went back into its little rock home.

See you around, little fella !

Night sounds

There's one thing that's very particular about Australia's animals: they don't shut up at night!

Sometimes it's funny, like when bats fight over ripe fruit, sometimes it's REALLY annoying, like when 50+ cockatoos do fly-by's screaming right next to your bedroom window at 5 am. And sometimes it's just spooky, like when you hear this at 2am ...

Monitor lizards in the glass house mountains

We went for a hike around mount Tibrogargan on Monday and we saw 5 or 6 different monitor lizards (they call'em Goannas here). Some were shy and scurried off to climb trees as soon as they spotted us. Others didn't really care, as long as we stayed a couple of meters away. Here's a BIG one (~1.5m) foraging for food around the staging area.

Lizards of the new year !

Well, it's been  a while since I posted something new, and what better way to start the year than the critter that started it all, the gecko !

I got these pictures of an Asian house gecko that hunts outside our office window at night. 

Check out those sticky feet !

As well as some video of hunting for little bugs ... pretty cool !



I spotted this baby skink outside the other day. I guess it's that time of year where the babies are left to fend for themselves. This little guy was small, 4 cm at most with tail.

Later that day I also saw this grasshopper, look at the loooong pointy head.

Flood Critters

With all the storms and rain we've been getting, the wildlife has changed around here: 

Most of the trees behind our house are gone, so there are less birds. Also, the flood way next to the house has been full of water for a week now, so we're starting to see ducks down there! Yesterday I spotted this little guy clinging to the patio door. Right out of a Telus ad!

Now here's something that had me worried today: I spotted these ants moving their eggs and larvae into our house. I don't care about a few ants in my walls, you can't avoid that here. But the last time I saw ants moving their eggs to higher ground was last saturday, and the next day we got hit with hurricane winds, torrential rain and huge hail. They're preparing for something ... I hope they're over-reacting this time.

Macro fun

After yesterday's events, I just spent a quiet Saturday at home. Macro photography really relaxes me, so I got out my camera and sat in the grass and had a close look at what I could find. 

I'm getting better with manual focus and at controlling the very shallow depth of field this lens produces. Here's some of the cool stuff I found.

This spikey beetle was a great subject, very slow moving and VERY cool looking.

Maybe this young praying mantis is the same one I shot a while back when it was a baby ?

Some vegetation. This is a close-up a bottlebrush flower bud

My rainbow chilies, lookin' fine !

Noosa Critters

Here's some pics of critters we saw while camping last weekend in Noosa.

This big guy greeted us on the first morning. He's a Gould's Monitor (aka Sand Goanna) and was about 1m long.

Gorgeous tongue!

This Green Tree Frog was pretty annoyed at us taking picture after picture, lots of flashes for those senstitve eyes.

This is a Garden Orb Weaver. It was fairly small (~2 cm) and had cool spikey legs.

Here's a different kind of monitor lizard, this one's a Lace Monitor, they climb trees with ease.

Skink. There were LOTS of these.

Another Skink.

Baby Mantis

These last couple of days, I noticed these weird ant-like bugs crawling around the outside of the house. They're black and about the size of a large ant (~1cm). But when you look closely, you'll notice the front legs are more like a mantis and their fat abdomen is actually a long skinny abdomen that's curled up ... So I did a quick search, and sure enough, these are mantis nymphs, it's pretty cool how they disguise themselves as black ants like that, it must help them survive...

Cool Insects

Just a few shots of some cool bugs I found while out on a macro photography run around the house. I'll spare you the spiders this time, instead I have this cool grasshopper. He was tiny but I caught him resting on a basil leaf and got this shot.

Tiny but colorful little fella.

Later, as I was showing Clo some weird fungus spores under a leaf, we both jumped as this guy started moving. We didn't see him at all, yet he was huge, about 15-20cm long !

Stick-insect (Mantid)

Can you spot him ?

Double-Barred Finch

These little guys have been become regulars over the past few weeks when the big birds aren't around. They eat the smaller seeds that the parrots don't seem to like as much, so they're a great addition to our little garden ecosystem.

They're tiny, so much so that gravity doesn't seems to affect them in flight, they just flutter lightly from once place to another. I like them because they look like they've had their face painted.

Not a great picture, but it gives an idea of the size of these little birds

Bye bye!