Australian Water Dragon, Queensland.
We were walking along a path to a popular waterfall and spotted some fungi. It wasn't until the water dragon's head twitched that I noticed it.
I purposefully only had a 100mm Macro lens on me at the time, so got as close as I could (about 60cm - 2 foot) and cranked the aperture to f/10 so I could get as much in focus as possible. Being in a rainforest, it was fairly dark, which meant a slow shutter of 1/80s and ISO6400 to compensate for the aperture. There was a LOT of slow exhalations to get as steady as possible.
Processing was done in Capture One Pro. A subject mask was applied to brighten up the dragon and give a wider dynamic range. The background was darkened quite a bit, with a warmer white balance to highlight the green and the sun filtering through the trees.
I particularly like the 3 fungi under the dragon's belly.
No added sharpening or other adjustments were necessary.
Camera: Pentax K1MII
Lens: Pentax HD D-FA 100mm f/2.8 ED AW Macro
Handheld.
I really like this image, would have loved to have seen all of its body in the shot. Understand that with it being in the open, and this is a wild animal asking to hold still while you compose the shot prob not going to happen. Nice DoF and the show pose from your subject makes me chuckle. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Raymond. The tail was at least as long as the body here and any extra unbalanced the shot.
It was remarkably still, so I did have the opportunity to move around quite a bit.