I took this picture of three baby mountain goats at the top of 14,265 foot Mt. Evans in Colorado. My friend and client, Nona Radin, was kind enough to drive to this location and show me where the best photo opportunities were. As the three babies played with each other and (probably) wondered how they were going to follow their mother on some of the terrifying cliffs below, I was able to capture various backgrounds consisting of distant -- and out of focus -- mountains. This shot was taken at 9am in July so the sun was already high. The original background was, to be honest, disappointing. It was out of focus enough so all the attention was directed at the goats, but it was too light, too blue, and too nondescript, i.e. boring. I tried several techniques to replace the background, including making a detailed selection around the animals with Topaz Mask AI, but none of them worked well. The problem was that there's too much fine detail in the backlit hair. Finally, I selected a sky from my files with the sun in the right place for the backlighting on the hair, and then I cloned from the new cloud photo to the goat image at 30% opacity with a large, soft brush. The reduced opacity allowed me to blend the new sky and the edge of the animals perfectly. I captured the picture with a Canon 300mm f/2.8 telephoto, and my settings were 1/2000, f/7.1, and 200 ISO.
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