In the swamps of Louisiana and Texas, egrets abound. You can see them everywhere. The problem for a photographer is that a telephoto lens is necessary to fill a significant part of the frame with the bird, and that means you can't create an environmental shot because the background will be significantly out of focus. Only if the egret is very small in the frame, and thus relatively far away, can the bald cypress trees that characterize the swamps be clearly defined. I captured this egret in flight with my new zoom, the 100-500mm telephoto, and then I took a second shot of the background. I used Photoshop to re-create what I saw with my eyes by combining the two images. The focal length for the egret shot was 500mm, and for the background I used 200mm. My settings for the landscape were 1/400, f/10, and 4000 ISO.
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