Local photographers leap to the aid of our frogs

Overall competition winner Melanie Osborne.

To launch the ARF’s year long campaign during the international ‘2008 Year of the Frog’, a call to local photographers, with great reef and rainforest prizes, was put out in conjunction with the Cairns Post Weekender magazine.

In the first two days the Cairns.com.au website was ‘overloaded’ with more than 220 entries. At the six weeks closing date over 700 entries had been received.

From this overwhelming response three winners were chosen from the three categories as judged by frog expert Dr Martin Cohen, Cairns Post photographer Marc McCormack and ARF Patron, Lynne Cosgrove. Our congratulations go to; Melanie Osborne, Katie Russo and Danielle Goodwin.

Category 1 winner Melanie Osborne (right) and runner-up Michael Anthony, receive their prizes from ARF Patron Lynne Cosgrove.

Category 2 winner Katie Russo (right) and runners-up Ross Pain (left) and Nathaniel Macauley (centre) are all smiles having received their reef and rainforest prizes.

Coinciding with the announcement of the winners in the Cairns Post the ARF hosted an exhibition of these photographs and a selection of runner-ups (40 in total) at the Reef Hotel Casino Cairns. Work donated by professional local photographers was also on display and all exhibits went under the hammer at an Operation Leap Frog auction which raised nearly $5,000.

Through Operation Leap Frog 2008 the Australian Rainforest Foundation (ARF) is encouraging everyone to get involved in keeping the world’s frogs alive, kicking and croaking and help prevent what could be the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.

Find out more and see all the wining entries to the competition http://www.arf.net.au/frogs/index.html