This is a southern ground hornbill. They are from east and south Africa, and I’ve never had one of these large birds get close enough to my safari vehicle to get a tight head shot like this one. I actually photographed this bird in the Bali Bird Park in Bali, Indonesia. The original background was busy and unattractive, so I selected the bird with Topaz Mask AI and then composited an African landscape behind it. This is why I constantly take pictures of backgrounds for use at some point in the future with other elements. Obviously, this kind of perspective is impossible to capture with photographic lenses. The main reason is because I photographed the bird with a medium telephoto while the landscape was captured with a wide angle lens. Plus, to have this kind of depth of field with the subject filling the entire frame is just not possible. I took artistic license to show, dramatically, a unique bird surrounded by its environment. On my last trip to Kenya, I watched two southern ground hornbills picking up insects with their huge beaks and flipping them into their mouths. It was amazing. My settings for the shot of the bird were 1/400, f/8, and 1000 ISO, and I captured it with a 70-200mm lens.
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