A rare clouded leopard

This is a clouded leopard, one of the most beautiful of the big cats and one of the rarest.  In nature, they are extremely secretive, living in dense forests in Southeast Asia. This unique cat is the closest living relative to the sabre-toothed cat that went extinct about 10,000 years ago.  I photographed this one in the Nashville Zoo.  The zoo has a breeding program to expand the gene pool of this endangered species.  I’ve had the original picture for several years, but the zoo background wasn’t very appealing. So, I decided to spend the time making the image better.  In Photoshop I replaced the background with a shot of rainforest.  However, the reason this doesn’t look entirely natural is because I photographed the cat (through glass) with a flash.  In compositing, you can mix focal lengths, but mixing lighting doesn’t work well.  The jungle was taken in diffused light, and the light from the flash looks artificial.  Nevertheless, this is a lot better than the original zoo background. I also cloned out the dot of light reflecting in the eyes and replaced it with the outdoor reflection in the eye of my dog.  It’s very subtle, but it was one more thing I could do to somewhat mitigate the look of the flash.