Location : in French countryside near Crozant in the lovely rural area of the Creuse Department. It was the time of the year for these frogs to announce their presence and boy were they noisy for their size! You had to be very slow and low in approaching them with no sudden movements. I was using image stabilization and the camera resting partially on the edge of the pond. It was just after sunrise at this small pond on the back of a disused barn. I had crawled up to the pond keeping my camera as low to the water as possible.

This image was captured about noon using a hand held Canon 7D camera and a Canon 100-400mm IS L zoom lens set at 400mm. I used servo focus with the center sensor and back button focus. The camera was set to aperture priority mode; wide open to blur the weed at f/5.6, ISO 100 and daylight white balance, and the exposure was 1/250th of a second. The RAW processing and the final adjustments were all done in Photoshop CS/6.