[Dennis]

Hello,

Here is our local female (?) wild Eastern Water Dragon. She has been living under our house for the last 1 ½ years or so, although recently, she has been disappearing for days at a time and we think that she may have gone to live in the local creek until she surprises us by re-appearing from underneath the house.

Late afternoon today, I caught her relaxing on top of a wall, with the pool in the background. She was in quite a shady position so I snapped a couple of shots on tripod with the 40D and 400mm F5.6L, 1/250 at F5.6 ISO400 on Program Mode.

In CS4 I lightened her head and body to recover it from the shadows and applied a Gaussian blur to the blue pool background and old concrete wall, to “lift” Lizzie from the background. Although it now looks a little pumped and perhaps artificial, I prefer it to the out-of-camera raw, flat version.

She wolfed down a couple of red grapes that we threw in her direction leading us to believe she may have been quite thirsty from the prolonged dry period and very dry, strong winds we’ve been having. We’ll put a shallow dish of fresh water out in the morning to see if she’ll drink from it.

Thanks for looking!

Dennis