One of my favorite birds to photograph is the roseate spoonbill. The shocking magenta against pink is visually arresting, and the beak is very unusual. I captured these birds in Tampa Bay, Florida from a small boat handholding a 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon lens. All of my flight shots were taken against a bland sky, so to make a more interesting picture, I combined the birds with a river scene I took in South Carolina. Spoonbills do nest and hunt in various Floridian rivers, but as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, long lenses always render the backgrounds out of focus. To provide a sense of environment, and to reproduce what our eyes see (which is always with complete depth of field), I combined a sharp foreground with a sharp background for a type of image we are not used to seeing. My settings for the image of the birds were 1/4000, f/2.8, and 250 ISO. My settings for the river shot were 1/30, f/22, and 200 ISO, and for this landscape I used a 16-35mm wide angle. When compositing images, you can usually combine a wide angle background with a telephoto subject. It’s essential, though, that the lighting on both elements be the same.
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