After I took many images of polar bears I was happy with, my mind begins imagining images that have a different look than what everyone else gets. Because pictures of wild polar bears have to be taken with a long lens, backgrounds necessarily will be out of focus and it's impossible to show the environment as an important element in the scene. Therefore, I took a lot of landscape shots to solve that issue. This composite consists of the bear, the landscape, and a dramatic sky. Again, it's not possible to capture both a bear and the sky where both components are sharp providing a telephoto is used and the bear is relatively large in the frame. Out of focus backgrounds are a manmade construct dictated by the laws of optics. Our eyes never see blurred backgrounds, so even though I used Photoshop to create this image, it approaches more closely what we see as compared to when a single shot is taken with a long lens. The bear photo was taken with 560mm of focal length, and the settings were 1/640, f/10, and 640 ISO. I used Topaz Mask AI to select the bear, and it did an excellent job at retaining the detail in the hair. In the process of putting the images together, I darkened the bear somewhat because the sky suggests the sun was behind the bear. That would have created a shadow on the front of the animal. I also darkened the entire image to simulate the muted light on the dark, overcast days characteristic of the far north.
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