High speed action shots

When you photograph a subject that's moving very fast and you want to freeze it with a fast shutter speed, that means the background will also be sharp -- or almost sharp.  I took this picture of a blue and yellow macaw in Brazil at 1/1600th of a second.  In the original picture, the background foliage was sharp and, in my opinion, that detracted from the subject.  Therefore, I selected the bird with the pen tool in Photoshop and replaced the entire background with a shot from my files of blurred foliage that I captured at 1/15th of a second.  This replacement background was much more complementary, and it also implied motion very nicely in a still photograph.

Cutting out the bird with the pen tool was laborious, but it is the most precise way to separate a subject from its background.  I enlarged the image to 400% when I made the selection so it was absolutely perfect.