Osprey in middle Tennessee

A couple of days ago a friend and I took a small fishing boat on a wildlife refuge in Tennessee to photograph osprey. There are quite a few small cypress trees in the middle of the lake where osprey nest, and with the high level of the water this puts them close to eye-level. At this time, the birds are building their nests but no eggs have been laid yet. My goal, of course, was to catch the osprey in flight with dynamic wing positions. I used a super fast shutter speed -- 1/3200th of a second -- to freeze even the tips of the wings. The lighting was diffused and somewhat muted, so I set my aperture to f/5.6. I took this shot with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto coupled with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. I set the camera to manual exposure mode, and the ISO was set to auto. This produced an ISO setting of 1250. The original background to this image was bland, out of focus clouds, so I added the tops of the trees that lined the lake as well as a stormy sky. I did this with layer masks in Photoshop. I am preparing a webinar that will be available shortly where I explain how to do techniques like this.