I know this image is way too wild/bizarre/over-the top for most of you who follow my posts, but the range of imagery I enjoy creating is more diverse than any photographer I know. I've been doing special effects since 1969, and for 10 years that's pretty much all I did -- decades before the digital revolution. For this composite, I started with the turquoise-colored Mexican alligator lizard on the left. I opened its mouth by selecting the lower part of the jaw and using Edit > transform > rotate; then selecting the upper part of the jaw and doing the same thing. I then took the horns of an African antelope to create a dragon-like crest on its neck. I also added additional spines to the dragon at lower right. This was a bronze statue of a dragon in Ljubljana, Slovenia where I added the iguana skin, the reptilian eye, and crocodile teeth. The fire-breathing performance at my semi-annual frog and reptile workshop was used for the fire coming from the dragons' mouths. The background balls of fire were captured during an airshow in Tennessee (I think it was napalm), and the red glow in the sky comes from the firestorm I shot very close to my house during the Porter Ranch fire in Northridge, California in 2003. The 'body of water' was created by using the Photoshop plug-in Flood.
2 Comments
Jun 16, 2019, 2:10:12 PM
Jim - Hi Stan, Thank you. The question really isn't how long it takes me to come up with the idea. Ideas pop into our minds all the time. As soon as I saw the lizard, I thought of this. The question is how long it took me to do it. My work for this picture was about an hour.
Jun 16, 2019, 1:16:52 PM
Stanley Greenberg - When I saw your image of the fire-breathing performer, I wondered how long it would take you to come up with something like this!! Well done.