Cyril couldn't believe his ears.
Some 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) up in the French Alps, beside a lake covered with ice, he could hear a frog chorus. They were singing away, presumably in the gap of air between the ice and the water. Ten days later, the ice began to melt, and the first choristers appeared. Cyril says, 'The males jump on anything that moves - even on my equipment,' holding on with the aid of the dark nuptial pads on their thumbs. Here, one male is holding onto another as they both wait for a female to show up. Cyril positioned his hide on the bank and carefully set up his camera and split-level lens half in the water, together with both underwater and above-water flashes and a cable linking the camera to his monitor. 'I wanted to portray everything about this extraordinary habitat - the mountains, the ice, the water and the cold - and create a shot which would show that even the most common species is extraordinary.'
France
Cyril has been a professional photographer for 20 years. His first encounter with the Borneo orang-utan influenced him to give pride of place to primates in his work. He now also focuses on amphibians such as frogs jumping on snow in the Alps, giant salamanders in Japan and goliath frogs in Cameroon. He also enjoys working on wildlife around his home, trying to make exotic, very common species.
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