I photographed this stellar eagle on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. It was coming in for a landing on some mounds of ice in mid-winter. The original sky was white, and I thought a more dramatic sky made the image better. Making a precise selection around the wings took time, but there's no sense in making a composite if it's not perfect. Usually I use a shutter speed of 1/3200 for birds in flight, but with large birds like eagles, osprey, egrets, and herons, sometimes I’ll use 1/2500. That helps keep the ISO just a little lower. The test for whether or not the shutter is fast enough is the sharpness of the wing tips. I know some photographs like wing tips to show motion blur, but I don’t. My other settings were f/5.6, 500 ISO, and I captured this with a focal length of 320mm.
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