One of the more striking birds in Africa is the bateleur eagle. I've only seen them twice, but the red bill and feet make any pictures of them visually arresting. I took this perched eagle with a 500mm focal length, and as I've discussed in the past, the clouds would definitely be out of focus due to the shallow depth of field of such a long lens. Since I usually like as much definition in my images as possible, I took a second picture of the sky, and then I combined both sharp images into one composite. In this case, I used Photoshop not to create some kind of special effect; rather I used digital technology to overcome the limitations of optics and to bring the image back to what I saw. Remember, we never see shallow depth of field with our eyes. My settings were 1/800, f/7.1, and 200 ISO. I captured this in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.
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