My kids find the frogs

My kids go out every night on a mission. Torches, buckets, the whole thing. Whatever they come back with is what we film.

That's the actual pipeline. Not a shot list, not a plan. Two kids in the dark deciding what tonight's subject is.

The cast

We own the corn snake and the bearded dragon, so those two are always available. Everything else is whatever gets caught.

The frogs have stopped being hard to find. I joke that they're lining up at the front door waiting for their turn in front of the camera.

Everything we catch gets looked after while it's here and goes back exactly where we found it. That part isn't negotiable, and the kids are stricter about it than I am.

The set is smaller than you think

It's a light box with a black background. That's it. The black isn't a trick, it's just the back of the box.

The log is from a pet store. I didn't go and find the perfect piece of driftwood, I bought one, and it's been in nearly every frame I've shot of an animal this year. If you've looked at my frog clips you've looked at that log a lot.

Always the probe

I don't reach for the macro lens for this. It's the probe every time.

The whole reason to shoot a frog this way is to get inside the scene rather than look at it from across the table, and nothing else does that. A 90mm macro is a lovely lens and it keeps you outside the shot.

What actually makes it hard

Three things, and none of them are the ones people ask about.

The box is small and the RED is big. That's a constant negotiation. The camera wants room that the set doesn't have, and the probe is the only reason the geometry works at all.

Critters move constantly. They're not performing, they're deciding whether to leave. You get a window, and the window closes while you're still checking focus.

And there's never enough light. Not once. Macro eats light, the working distance eats more, and you're stopped down because depth of field at that magnification is nothing. I have never once finished a macro session thinking I had light to spare.

Why it's worth it anyway

Because it doesn't land until you see it big.

Something the size of my thumbnail, breathing, filling a wall. That's the whole reason, and the small box and the pet store log and the kids with torches are just what it takes to get there.