Siberian lynx in winter

Usually wildlife photographers try to get clean images of their subjects. My this I mean they don't want distracting elements like branches, grasses, reeds, and other aspects of a natural environment intruding, blocking, or distracting such that our attention is diverted from the subject. Yesterday's post is an example of what I and other photographers try to get. The image I'm posting now -- a Siberian lynx -- shows the opposite. The cat is in the middle of a jumble of plant stems, and there is even a reddish stem right in front of the face. In art, there are always exceptions to rules, and this is one of them. I like the picture because the plant stems are natural, appropriate, and believable. Most of the time, animals -- whether captive or wild -- don't pose in perfect compositional settings, and this image suggests that. I could easily clone that stem from the front of the lynx's face, but I'm not going to do that. My settings were 1/1250, f/13, and the auto ISO setting gave me 5000.