This is a black palm cockatoo I photographed in the Bird Park in Bali, Indonesia. These are amazing birds. Their life span is 40-90 years, and to own one they average in price from $8000 to $16,000. Even though this was in captivity and I had all the time in the world to set my camera, I made a typical mistake I've repeated (unfortunately) many times, and I see other photographers making the same error. I used a lens aperture too large and with shallow depth of field such that a significant portion of the bird was soft. In this case, I focused on the eye so the head and the head feathers were sharp, but I overlooked the folded wing closest to the camera. It was not on the same plane as the face, and my f/5.6 aperture didn't provide enough depth of field to hold those wing feathers in focus. To me, the soft feathers were visually annoying and they ruined the shot. They were so soft, in fact, that Topaz Sharpen AI was not able to sharpen them. So, I searched for another shot of the same bird taken at the same time in which that wing was sharp, and then I selected and pasted it onto the blurred wing. To blend the two elements perfectly, I used a layer mask -- Photoshop's secret weapon for doing amazing things. My other settings were 1/800 and 1600 ISO, and I took this with a 400mm focal length outdoors in open shade.
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