Despite being extensively shared, the story behind the shot and its shooter remained a mystery.
Julie-Anne O’Neill says the air outdoors begins to teem with life before a major storm hits North Queensland, Australia.
“Everything goes haywire. “It’s like a feeding and mating frenzy,” she describes it.
On one such night in 2011, O’Neill went for a late-evening walk. She was carrying a huge flashlight known as a dolphin lamp, which she intended to use to watch how the local fauna reacted to the approaching storm.
On this stroll, she took the photograph that she would later refer to as the “crown jewel” of her nature photography collection. She heard her topic before she saw it: a loud shrieking that felt both familiar and strange.
The biggest Australian green tree frog she had ever seen was on the ground in front of her.
O’Neill was accustomed to seeing these green tree frogs on her land. They’re prevalent across Australia, but this was the first time she’d seen one consume something other than an insect. (See how green tree frogs try to devour snakes twice their size.)
She was taken aback by the sight at first, but then she remembered the new digital camera she had purchased for precisely such an occasion. O’Neill maintains she wasn’t attempting to be a photographer for the sake of photography. Instead, she wanted to photograph some of the unusual things she had seen out in nature.
“I’d say something to someone and they’d say, ‘Oh that’s bullshit Jules,’ so I decided to get a camera and take pictures.”
When she returned outside with her camera, she saw the tree frog had climbed up a wicker basket and was perched on the edge.
“I was still adjusting to the Canon. “My fingers were numb from holding the shutter down,” she recalls. It took many efforts with her huge flashlight held over her head to gain a clear glimpse of the snake still lodged within the frog’s mouth. “When I finally cracked the shot off, it felt like victory.”
O’Neill was confident the frog would perish at the moment. The frog’s tongue was riddled with puncture holes, and with the snake still furiously squirming, she believed the amphibian’s unique meal would be its last.
But the frog was still there in the morning. Green tree frogs were a familiar sight for O’Neill; she’d even seen one slither out of her toilet after apparently swimming up her pipes, but this one stood out because of its gigantic size. She stated it filled both of her palms after picking it up.
O’Neill expected the photo to be popular when she put it on Google+ in 2011, but she didn’t foresee the large following it finally garnered on numerous social platforms, Reddit foremost among them.
When National Geographic featured this shot earlier in October, O’Neill was taken aback by how famous it had become.
While she admits the attention has been overwhelming, she is pleased that others are appreciating the shot as much as she does and that she is finally receiving credit.
