This week's picture is dedicated to all the brave crickets that selflessly and unknowingly give their lives to feed Freddie and Marabelle. Well, maybe "brave" is the wrong word. "Blissfully ignorant" may be a better description.

It's hard enough to get good pictures of the frogs when they are sitting still for 13 seconds, but this week I made my life way more difficult by trying to get "action" shots of the frogs at feeding time. Very few of the pictures worked out, since I had to use a huge aperture which reduced the depth of field to mere millimeters.

However, I did manage to get this dramatic shot of an unsuspecting cricket trying to figure out where it is while a large frog (Marabelle) looms behind it ready to pounce. About two seconds after I took this photo, Marabelle did pounce and swallowed the cricket in one gulp. As you may have guessed by now, these frogs are not vegetarians. In fact, they will only eat something if it is alive.

The cricket was dusted with calcium and vitamin powder, which is why it doesn't quite look like a normal cricket. It is the best way to make sure the frogs get enough calcium for strong bones, and enough vitamins to stay healthy on a diet of only crickets.

Technical details: This photos was taken with my Rebel XT + EF 50mm Mark II at ISO 1600, f/1.8 at 1/125th of a second. I could have reduced the aperture and decreased the shutter speed to get more depth of field, but the lighting conditions change drastically depending on where the frogs are so I was just shooting in Av mode with -2 exposure compensation to make sure I could quickly react if the frogs moved to the shadows and still have a chance of getting a shot that was in focus. Obviously I had to digitally push this shot by at least 2 stops, and I did my normal thing of converting to B/W using a simulated orange filter, which I find works well when shooting under infrared incandescent bulbs.