Scale is always a hard thing to show in a photograph, and it can be an easy thing to manipulate. With the right perspective, you can make models look like mountains and mountains look like simple piles of dirt. And showing the size of something, particularly something very small, can be as challenging as getting a good photography. Let’s take the above photo as an example.

Mohamad has this excellent photo of a Golden Frog. As a wildlife/animal shot, it is straight up excellent: tight focus on the eyes, the frog is in a noble pose, and there is even a beautiful, shallow depth-of-field with a gorgeous bokeh. The only criticism I can find is that it misses capturing the scale of frog. Sure, if you know what you’re looking for you can deduce the animal’s size; but it’s more dramatic to show it. As the photo is composed here, the viewer could get the idea that the frog is several inches tall, rather than just a few millimeters.

Of course, scale is probably not what Mohamad was aiming for with this shot. My guess would be he wanted to capture the frog in it’s natural environment. And he certainly succeeded at that; it is a phenomenal shot!