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Photographic Opportunities

on Dec 17, 2014

Photography is my passion and as an enthusiastic photographer my eyes are always scanning for photographic opportunities.

Coming back from a drive one evening I walked past the water feature within Bush Lodge's reception area and noticed tadpoles swimming close to the light.

I had heard the calls from Eastern Olive Toads in the area of the water feature recently and I could only assume that the tadpoles belonged to them. Lost in my thoughts while staring at the tadpoles I realized that this could make a unique photograph. I immediately made use of the opportunity.

24Jan12 Tadpole Calvin Kotze

To capture the greenish colour of the spotlight submerged in the water I didn't want to use a flash so I decided to place all my confidence in the Nikon D7000's amazing low light capabilities. I used my Nikon 105mm macro lens and switched it to 'M' (Manual) as I always do with macro. I decided that I would need a relatively quick shutter speed to freeze these little guys swimming, so I set my shutter speed to 1/100. I needed depth of field and therefore set my aperture to F10. I pushed my ISO to 2000 and was ready to go.

It felt like I took 500 images to get to this single photograph. The trickiest part of taking this photo was to have the tadpole close enough to the light to achieve the right effect. It took an hour of trial and a lot of errors but in the end it came out exactly as I had in mind.

Live curiously

Calvin Kotze

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