I photographed this western diamondback rattlesnake in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona as part of a photo workshop I did there. The original picture had a solid blue sky in the background. Using Photoshop’s new Sky Replacement feature, I added a new sky with some clouds. I then made that image out of focus (using Filter > blur gallery > field blur) because the furthest parts of the snake, and the furthest parts of the dead tree, are not sharp due to limited depth of field. Therefore, the sky had to be soft, simulating the loss of depth of field of a long lens. I took this with a 100-400mm lens at the 263mm mark, and even though I used a small aperture -- f/16 -- I wasn’t able to make the entire reptile sharp. If you look closely, the rattle isn’t tack sharp. That’s why the sky had to be out of focus. My other settings were 1/800th of a second and 500 ISO. In retrospect, I could have used f/32. I was able to catch the flickering tongue because I set my frame rate to 14 fps.
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