Eye of the Dragon, shown below, is a Photoshop composite of an extreme close-up of a dahlia blossom and my left eye.
For more about the image of my eye, check out this story. Here is another kind of image made from my eye in Photoshop.
I photographed the dahlia itself using a new piece of gear that I am very pleased with, a Novoflex bellows fitted to my Leica M11-P. The Novoflex and the associated focusing rail come with an Arca mount, so its easy to put the assemblage on a tripod.
The lens I used was the Leica 135mm f/3.4. Sitting on a focusing rail, the bellows lengths the distance between the focal plane and the rear element of the lens, essentially allowing me to go as close as I’d like in a continuous range.
Eye of the Dragon falls into a body of surrealist work that I’ve made that I call “Impossible Images.” You could think of these composites as “artisanal AI” or “hand-generative AI”: the images are all my copyrights, and I’ve done the combining myself the old-fashioned laborious way, using layers and masking.