Ibises in flight

We can't always capture what we see. Freezing the wings of birds in flight, for example, when the ambient light is low either requires an extremely high ISO -- often north of 25,600 -- or we can use Photoshop and put the pieces together. Photography has limitations, and I'm constantly figuring out how to overcome those problems. These are two hadada ibises in flight. To freeze the motion, I photographed them in daylight with a shutter speed of 1/3200. I captured the acacia tree against a sunset sky with beautiful mauve colors using the camera settings of 1/100, f/8, and 2500 ISO. Had I used such a slow shutter with the flying birds, they would have been disappointingly blurred. The ibises were flying against a bright sky, so it was a simple matter of selecting the silhouetted shapes and then placing them above the tree (using the blend mode 'darken'). I resized them so the proportions were correct with Edit > transform > scale. Ibises land and take off from trees all the time, but due to the inability of lenses and sensors to reproduce what our eyes can see in low light, I created a composite that duplicated a common scene in the South African bush.