Beautiful fog

Here is one more picture of the sandhill cranes in Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. Early in the morning before sunrise, there was a lot of fog hovering just above the lake. I love fog, so I took several images for use as background material. The three birds took flight before the sun rose, and with reduced light I had to compromise my shutter speed. I used a 500mm lens, and the settings were 1/1600, f/7.1, and 8000 ISO. I would have preferred 1/3200, but there just wasn't enough light. In post-processing, I used Topaz Photo AI to mitigate the noise and to sharpen the birds. I then took the time to use the pen tool to make precise selections of each of the three cranes and then pasted them into the foggy background. However, they still didn't look quite right. The birds looked too bold, so to speak, in the muted, foggy environment. So, I lowered the opacity of each bird to 77%. That worked for me. Anyone can use a telephoto lens to photograph birds with a blurred background. But to show the habitat and environment requires a new approach.