Photoshop and reality

This is a black-browed albatross flying past an iceberg near South Georgia Island. I used a 500mm telephoto to fill a significant part of the frame with the bird. The problem, of course, is that the original background was out of focus. I wanted to capture what I saw, and that meant showing everything in this scene sharp. Since the blue ice is what makes this composition so compelling, I took a second shot in which I focused on the ice. Because the 500mm lens has such shallow depth of field, while focusing on the iceberg the sky was out of focus. Therefore, I took a third shot in which the sky was sharp. I then I put all three pictures together. For those of you who are 'purists', especially concerning nature photography, you must consider that the limitations of optics often don't show us what our eyes see. So, using Photoshop isn't altering the reality of the scene. Rather, with post-processing techniques, you can make a picture look like you saw it.