Monk parakeets in flight

These are monk parakeets I photographed in the Pantanal region of Brazil. Green is my favorite color, and if it's green, I want a good picture of it. I spent a lot of time trying to capture the perfect picture of these beautiful blue and green birds, but I wasn't able to get it in one shot. The problem with a flock of birds, especially small birds that fly like bullets, is this: A telephoto lens has to be used to fill a significant part of the frame with the subjects, but it has shallow depth of field. That means it's impossible to get most or all of the birds sharp. A few will be sharp, but most won't. Therefore, in order to create the type of image I wanted, in Photoshop I selected the sharp birds from several images (taken at 20 fps) and composited them together. I then added an image of clouds that were sharp, and this also would have been impossible given the limitations of our long lenses. Even with a small aperture like f/32, a 500mm telephoto will render background clouds soft. Finally, I used the new Generative fill feature in the beta version of Photoshop to complete the wing of the bird at the top of the frame. It had been inadvertently cropped off. For small birds like this, I use a shutter speed of 1/4000.