I am not a photographic purist in any sense of the word. I do a lot of artistic, surreal, and creative images that look nothing like reality. However, I also like realism -- that is, I like to capture what I see -- but that's often a problem due to the limitations of our camera gear, and this is particularly true of lenses. Out of focus backgrounds, for example, are a manmade construct. We never see soft backgrounds behind a subject with our eyes. So, if I'm using a 500mm focal length and photographing a bird, the background is going to be out of focus virtually every time. If I want to capture what I see, though, I have to use Photoshop to circumvent the limitations of optics. That's what I did here. This is a black-browed albatross I photographed on my way down to Antarctica. The ice formations and the dramatic sky were out of focus. I wasn't happy with that. So, I took a separate picture of the iceberg and another one of the sky, and then I used Photoshop to composite them together. This is what I saw, and this is what I wanted to capture.
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