I photographed these three baby mountain goats on the top of 14,265 foot Mt. Evans in Colorado. There is a parking area there and the goats can frequently be seen grazing in the summer. The three siblings were looking over the cliff and probably thinking, Mom couldn't possibly want us to go down there! With wildlife photos, we have become accustomed to seeing out of focus backgrounds due to the shallow depth of field characteristic of telephoto lenses. You usually can't fill the frame with wild animals with short lenses. Even though we never see shallow DOF with our eyes, that's what we are used to with wildlife photography. In fact, soft backgrounds direct all our attention to the subjects, and that's a good thing. Nevertheless, more and more I am liking complete depth of field throughout wildlife images, so I replaced the background with a sharp sky. In this case, the original background was soft because 1) I was close to the goats, 2) the focal length of my lens was 300mm, and 3) my aperture was moderately large at f/7.1. To retain all the detail in the animals' fur, I used Topaz Mask AI for the replacement.
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