If you're in a position to join a new team, or review someone else's work, do yourself and them a favor and listen before you speak. Especially if you're evaluating a situation that was negotiated.

The cover photo is my wood duck photograph from last weekend.

If you've ever tried to photograph a wood duck in nature you know that they're very skittish. So it's difficult to get a good, detailed, in-focus shot like this.

This shot was heavily negotiated, and I'm very happy with the results.

You see, I go to the woods with my camera because I enjoying seeing and sharing photos of animals up close and frozen in time before they run, fly, or hop away.

In this case, I was approaching a narrow bridge over a stream when I saw that there were wood ducks there. And everyone loves a good wood duck photo:)!

So I stopped and put a teleconverter on my camera to get a decent photo of the ducks without getting too close.

As I was sneaking up on the ducks, my foot caught a vine on the ground, I tripped and ended up in some very shallow water at the side of the pond.

And I scared away the wood ducks.

So I turned around to get back on the trail when I saw the little fellow pictured below hopping out of my way. Getting a photo of this little wood frog before it hopped away would align very nicely with my mission!

The problem is that it was very small, blended into the leaves, was in the shadows, and was pretty close -- too close for a camera configured to get long range wood duck photographs.

Rather than reconfigure my camera and lose the shot, I took this photo manually, at a very low shutter speed, using manual focus.

Now, I know that this photo isn't going on the cover of National Geographic, but it was a difficult shot to get and and I'm happy with the results.

Now that you have the story of this photo, you may think it's ok too.

But if you just compare it to the last photo you saw, which happened to be a beautiful wood duck, you may dismiss it as just a stupid photo of a frog.

And that would not be a good way to evaluate this photo.