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Warning - more frogs !!

PostPosted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 11:58 pm
by blacknstormy
What else would you do after a hard days work than go out and do some more frogging ?????? (OK, so I'm sick)

Broad-palmed rocketfrog (Litoria latopalmata) ~40mm

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Scarlet-sided pobblebonk (Limnodynastes terraereginae) ~75mm

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Sandy gungan (Uperoleia fusca) ~30mm

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Beeping froglet (Crinia parinsignifera) ~25mm (for this shot I was actually sitting in the pond, and boy do I have a wet ass !!!! LOL)

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:03 am
by Handlebars
Absolutely beautiful!

are these to be published? you seem to have the whole set...

Re: Warning - more frogs !!

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:06 am
by Underload
Great pics Rel!

I have to ask though...

blacknstormy wrote:Scarlet-sided pobblebonk


Who thinks up these names?!? They're crazy :wink:

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:22 am
by blacknstormy
Thanks guys :)

Warren - we do fauna surveys as part of our business, as well as our 'normal' jobs, so have a bit of a library of fauna photos LOL (poor Damian), but as part of our volunteer work down the coast, we are putting out a free booklet on the frogs of Southport, so the photo's will come in handy :) LOL

Underload - you've got to love common names huh?? LOL It's call is like a 'bonk', so I guess that's where the 'bonk' in the name came from. Some are really coloured up along the side where this one is a yellow/cream, they can be really red, hence the scarlet sided :) ... the pobble .... ???????

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:45 am
by Dargan
A pobblebonk!! :? Good to see some more frogs though :D

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 8:06 am
by Ladybird
And as if 'gungan' (I know, Star Wars) and 'rocketfrog' are normal names as well????

Are the people who name frogs reknowned for licking them beforehand??

Rel, great shots as always. I don't know how you tell them all apart.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 8:22 am
by ATJ
Another great set, Rel.

The only minor nit I have is they still look to me like the white balance is out. The reeds in the last one look an odd shade of green.

Common names suck. They vary from location to location and from book to book. There's no right or wrong common name, even though they are all different. I hate them.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 10:20 am
by blacknstormy
Andrew - you could be right - I might have to have a go at callibrating the old lappy again :(

thanks Dargan & Liz - common names are an absolute shocker, but sometimes they can be pretty amusing ;) One of the guys in my lab at the moment is trying to come up with common names for a few hundred snails - looks like one of them is going to be called the 'dark knight' - we were pushing for the 'dark lord', but it got vetoed :) LOL

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 11:54 am
by ATJ
blacknstormy wrote:Andrew - you could be right - I might have to have a go at callibrating the old lappy again :(

That might help, but it is probably easier to calibrate your white balance for the lightsphere so that the WB is correct out of the camera. I never did this until around 4 months ago and since I have done it, I never have to worry about WB for macro work.

For my D70, I used the Sunny, Cloudy, etc. settings with the fine tuning of +3,+2,+1 etc. to get as close as possible to the right values. I did this by taking photos of a Kodak Gray card with all the different options and then using Gray Point option in CaptureNX to determine which one was closest to being correct. For my setups I have determined the following:
SB-24: Cloudy -1
SB-800: Cloudy -2
SB-24 with softbox: Sunny
SB-800 with softbox: Sunny +3

For my D300, I found it easier do just use Preset Manual as there are 4 slots to store different presets. Again I used my Kodak Gray card.

So now, I don't even have to worry about WB.

blacknstormy wrote:thanks Dargan & Liz - common names are an absolute shocker, but sometimes they can be pretty amusing ;) One of the guys in my lab at the moment is trying to come up with common names for a few hundred snails - looks like one of them is going to be called the 'dark knight' - we were pushing for the 'dark lord', but it got vetoed :) LOL

I like common names that are literal translations of the scientific name. e.g. Litoria peronii - Peron's tree frog; Litoria latopalmata - Broad-palmed tree frog.

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 12:47 pm
by blacknstormy
Thanks for that Andrew - I'll drop by Photocontinental and pick one up and give it a go :)

I like common names that are literal translations of the scientific name
- I like common names that provide an obvious and succinct description of the determining characteristic of the animal/insect - like the green-thighed frog for Litoria brevipalmata (has an obvious green thigh), or the cherry nose cicada for Macrotristria angularis - obvious red nose :)

But, if the general public are willing to learn about insects or frogs, or anything really, and use a common name, I'm happy - sometimes getting people interested in scientific names is just toooo hard :(

PostPosted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 4:13 pm
by ATJ
blacknstormy wrote: - I like common names that provide an obvious and succinct description of the determining characteristic of the animal/insect - like the green-thighed frog for Litoria brevipalmata (has an obvious green thigh), or the cherry nose cicada for Macrotristria angularis - obvious red nose :)

Ah, but sometimes that can work out badly.

A few years ago I was at the Natural History Museum in DC (part of the Smithsonian). They had a number of stuffed birds on display including a galah and a kookaburra. The common name they used for the galah was "Rose-breasted Cockatoo" and for the kookaburra, "Giant Kingfisher". While both of those were descriptive, they really suck as common names for those two birds.

blacknstormy wrote:But, if the general public are willing to learn about insects or frogs, or anything really, and use a common name, I'm happy - sometimes getting people interested in scientific names is just toooo hard :(

I can't remember who said this, but it has been said that if young children can remember the names of all those dinosaurs, why can't adults learn a few scientific names?

You are perhaps lucky you don't work with corals. Fortunately (for me :D ) many corals don't have scientific names, but aquarists like to use common names and they are just so ambiguous. For example, "mushroom coral" gets used on at least two completely unrelated groups of corals - one group are stony corals and the other are soft corals.