Telephoto lenses make shallow depth of field. Out of focus backgrounds force all the attention on the subject, and that is an artistic way to interpret a scene. I do this often. But to show the subject in its natural context, the background needs to be sharp. The worst case scenario is when the background is 'a little' blurred. I have taken thousands of pictures like that, and it always annoys me. For the picture you see here, I took two separate shots. I photographed both images with a 100-400mm lens and obviously in the same light, but I focused on the owl for the first shot and then I focused on the background for the second. I used Photoshop to assemble the two photos, and the composite really represents what I saw. Since we never see out of focus backgrounds except in photographs, this is actually a more realistic picture. Admittedly, this looks a bit strange because we are not used to seeing this kind of depth of field with bird images.
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