Steven Labkoff Earns a Perfect Score for “The Dragon’s Lair” in our January Photo Competition

Jan 25, 2020 Comments Off by David Henkel

Congratulations to Steven Labkoff for achieving a perfect score of 27 from our three judges at our January’s competition. Steven’s image was submitted into the Black & White Print Class Salon Open Subject category.

Here is Steven’s remarks about the image:

“This shot was made at our SPC Fish Bowl Pet’s shoot in late December 2019.

The image was made in a multi-stage process. Capture: A black board was placed behind the bearded dragon’s aquarium. A close-up ring lamp was placed off to the left (lizard’s right) shining in at about 45 degrees There was an orange heat lamp above the lizard as well. Eight shots were made using a focus stacking technique (the lizard doesn’t do much other than sit, so he’s a great candidate for a focus stack). The resultant eight images were stacked into one, ultra sharp image using an in-camera focus stacking engine on the Olympus OM-D EM1x. Processing: The resultant single image was then post processed using a RAW, self-blending technique using luminosity masking. The technique creates different exposures of the same image and blends different parts of the identical image together to get different brightnesses and contrasts into the final image. A luminosity mask was used to select the background in a -2 stop version of the image. At -2 stops, the background went to black. The darker version is placed on top of the normal exposure, and the LM is used to select out just the background. The dark background is selectively allowed to show through, and the foreground of the lizard and his wonderful textured skin is unaffected. The end product is what you see.”