This is the most famous bird in Africa among Photographers -- the lilac-breasted roller. It's extremely difficult to capture them in flight because they are so fast, and I try every time my photo tour group spots one in a tree. It is even more difficult to photograph them with something of interest in their beak. I didn't realize this bird had a lizard until I enlarged the picture on my computer at home. The problem, though, was that the roller had been on the ground and it had flown straight up for several feet. When the shutter tripped, the bird was at the top of the frame with the entire head -- starting just above the eye -- out of the frame. This shot was potentially too good to discard, so I used Image > canvas size in Photoshop to expand the image area on the top. Then, I selected the top of the head from another roller picture, taken in a previous year, and pasted that on this bird. I then added more foliage background in the newly expanded area with the clone tool. Finally, I cropped the bottom of the frame to keep the rectangular proportion. The key, here, was that I had several other roller photos from which I could find a workable solution. Most photographers would have trashed a shot of a bird where the head was missing. That makes perfect sense. Thanks to what's possible in Photoshop, however, I was able to produce one of my favorite images from Africa.
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