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.
Lovely shot Dennis - plenty of detail here. I don't find the gaussian blur on the background artificial or too much, it looks quite good to my eyes. She's quite the model.
Looks like its a lizards life round your parts to me. I had these lizards hanging around all the time in my old house .. it was all i could do to keep them OUT of the pool. They will come quite close once they trust you .. or you dont move .. many a time Ive one try and chew a toe off ... then you move hahahaha .. Great picture .. really top shot.
Lizzie is still quite wary of us. When we were rolling up the pool blanket on the roller, she freaked out and tried to climb the fence so we backed off to let her retreat back under the house, through the battens, before continuing.
I guess a healthy fear of humans is a useful thing? Our greatest concern has been the neighbour’s cat and we hope that Lizzie is now big enough to make the cat think twice before attacking.
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