Boyd's forest dragon

[greg cowle]

A Boyd's forest dragon in the rainforest last night. This is it's hunting pose - it hunts by waiting for something to come by. Luckily, they do it about eye level in the forest.
This was generated by merging 5 shots to create a vertical 'panorama'. Focus was determined by the first shot on the eye, so the tail is going OOF as it goes below eye level. The other way to do this would be to change focus on each shot. But the downside for the post is that it is a massive downsize of close to 5 full frame images with small overlap. I may post a detailed view of a small portion, as the detail is really cool.
280mm, 1/200, f13, ISO400. Light from Speedlite ETTL.

[Dumay de Boulle]

Lovely detail and nice tones.
Looks like it was difficult to choose a crop with that long tail. I think you could stay vertical and give a little more each side and it will still work.
TFS!!

[John Mack]

Very cool. Like how you can see that long tail. Nice job on thinking digital.

[Jonathan Ashton]

Good job on the stitching, it does not look apparent to me. I like the exposure and the dark but not black background. the lighting has provided "clean" illumination with out specular highlights, I really like it.
As a slight criticism, I would suggest the image is a little tall at 1600 px, I don't think there would be many people who could view that at native size, I appreciate that "Ctl-" will reduce size but then you do not get the true image quality.

[greg cowle]

Thanks all for the comments. This is all I had left for space on both sides after the stitching, I agree it is tight. I may play with extending the canvas in PS, even if only by a bit on the left.
For reference, the stitching was done in Lightroom, first time I have attempted in LR (actually first time trying this with wildlife). I must say I was impressed with the result. Probably helps it was a high contrast image.
Jonathan, agree with you on the size of the post, I normally post smaller than the max, but with the massive downsizing I went 1600 on this. Honestly it is not a very good aspect ratio for online viewing, much better suited to a print. But I did want to show the full extent of this reptile.