When I conducted my winter wildlife workshop in Montana, I suggested to the participants they photograph background landscapes to possibly use later in post-processing. That's what I did here. I photographed the stand of trees, and then I experimented with combining it with the snow leopard. The original background behind the cat was solid white -- a snow field -- and I liked it a lot. But with the addition of the trees, the picture now has a sense of depth and a sense of environment. It's a unique look because we expect out of focus backgrounds when using telephoto lenses. I captured the cat with a 500mm focal length on the 100-500mm Canon zoom. With both the foreground and the background sharp, this is something we would see with our eyes but not with the use of long lenses. To blend the forest with the leopard, I used a layer mask and the gradient tool. In other words, I pasted the trees onto the background layer, the cat, and then -- with the foreground/background color boxes black/white, respectively -- I chose the gradient tool and dragged the cursor up through the stand of trees. That attenuated the layer in such a way that I could combine the two elements without ever making a selection.
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