Travel Theme: Symbol

Yellow is often a color associated with caution.  That might be a good thing to keep in mind if you ever run into one of these in the wild:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

This is a Black-legged Poison Dart Frog and is actually poisonous enough to kill you.  Having said that, I also read that if kept in captivity they are not poisonous.  Do you ever read things like that and wonder who tested that?

Anyway, this particular frog is on display at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.  This was a bit of a tough shot to get because the frog was behind glass so there was a bit of a glare, and although the surroundings were bright, this particular enclosure was dark.  There were a few of these frogs on display and I decided to shoot the one closest to the glass so that I could have a small f-stop number to let in light, but since the subject was close he would still be in focus.  In my opinion, I am stretching it a bit here.  I would have liked the frog to be a bit sharper, but this is the best I came up with.  When I was editing this photo, I wanted to keep the frog as realistic looking as possible.  So while I made a few adjustments, levels and sharpening, I was really doing them to make the image clearer.  I also used a Iris blur filter, which in Photoshop is under Filter-Blur-Iris Blur.  I set the blur to 15 pixels and then added a light bokeh of 6%.  Doing this kept the frog sharp but blurred the background a bit.  Here is the original photo:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.2 1/60

So what do you think of my edited version?  Is it in keeping enough with the original for your taste?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

This post was written as a response to the weekly travel photo challenge at Where’s my Backpack? The theme this week is symbol. Nature sometimes provides creatures with their own built in warning symbols, better to pay attention to them when you see them.

Cheers!