This is an oryx in sunset lighting in Namibia. I shot this with a 400mm focal length, and that meant by focusing on the animal, the background dunes would be out of focus. It's true that the subject would stand out, but a sense of place would be lost. The dunes in Namibia are the largest and most impressive in the world, and to render them as a blurred backdrop seemed to me to be a mistake. In order to capture both subject and background in focus, I had to take two separate pictures and then put them together in Photoshop. This allowed me to circumvent the laws of physics and the limitations of optics. My settings for both images were 1/400, f/7.1, and 800 ISO. Note the warm colors from the low angled sun; this is why I always use daylight white balance for outdoor photography. That setting reproduces sunrise and sunset colors accurately. Auto white balance does not.
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