A frog is a frog is a frog

Last week I was on vacation in a quiet hotel complex in Turkey. Power relaxation. One evening I was walking with my love through the hotel's green oasis in the heat of the night when we saw frogs. Whoa, hey, and of course I left my Fuji Oh, I thought to myself: the best camera is always the one you have with you. So I carefully took my iPhone out of my shorts and slowly approached the frog until I was finally able to capture the surprisingly calm waiting hopper in the full frame. I proudly presented my picture on my Facebook page. Of course no one was interested, because a bad picture of a boring frog is a bad picture of a boring frog. Nobody can tell from the picture that I was only a sensational 5 cm away from a live frog.

That's always the frustrating thing: you make the effort, crawl through terrain on all fours or accept real dangers to life and limb - and in the end no one is interested in the picture. That's just how it is in the photography business, the how is often more exciting than the result - but usually only for the photographer. With a making-of, my loved one would probably have gotten more likes than I did with the final picture. Right? Well, it's pretty stupid to crawl so close to a frog with an iPhone until it fills the display accordingly.

As a criterion for a good picture, there are only two real, hard conditions: is it interesting! Since there are two ways why a picture can be interesting, you are not reading a contradiction 😉 Either you photograph something interesting or you photograph someone interesting.

For me, the chance to photograph a frog was tempting enough to start looking for a green hopper again the next day. This time I actually had my new camera with me. Is the picture interesting now? The result is very similar to the first attempt - but the camera and lens have a different quality.

In order to make the picture a little more interesting, at least for other photographers, I would like to mention that it is with the wonderful Zeiss Macro-Planar T* 100mm f/2 was photographed with the aperture wide open – one Nikon adapter thank you. What's even more amazing is that I can do it without it Focus peaking I had to focus manually - and the digital viewfinder had a hard time reaching its limits in the lighting conditions. What's absolutely crazy is that the image has an exposure time of 1/7s - at 100mm on the crop sensor, as a rule of thumb, 1/150s is necessary for sharp images. That's a factor of 20! Cheers to my built-in image stabilization technology 😉