I sort of drowned under the onslaught of the amount of photos I shot this year and this little critter got buried with me. Mix your metaphors much, Kris? 
I just love amphibians and toads in particular. Always have. Luckily we usually have many in the yard and I found this beauty on the edge of the woods. It’s a little awkward, but these guys are so touchy that I didn’t want to frighten it any more than I was doing. The standing up pose was too good to risk by moving that leaf, so it stayed even though it’s kind of annoying. I love the undersides of toads as much as their topsides, but they’re harder to photograph so I got lucky here. I had my LED panel on a GorillaPod just to the left and it illuminated things quite nicely since it was pretty dim and shady. The shutter speed is slow enough that you can see movement in the throat.
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Leaf still too much? I cloned out another, but this was just too big.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
tripod for both LED panel and camera
Lr for RAW processing including the square crop, texture & clarity, the usual white and black points and some sharpening. Into Ps to get rid of a leaf and to do a Free Vignette in the TK8 panel.