Swamp photography

I captured this blue heron during my last Louisiana Swamp tour. One of my favorite locations on this trip is Lake Martin because the bird life, the alligators, and the incredible cypress trees all come together to create a primordial environment. The nature photography here is unlike anything I've seen, and it's beautiful to see and photograph. I photographed the bird with a 100-500mm Canon zoom plus a 1.4x teleconverter. My focal length ended up being 661mm, and that meant the background -- which I loved -- was out of focus. To address that issue, I took a second shot of just the background with a shorter focal length, and then combined the two images in Photoshop so I had complete depth of field just like I saw with my eyes. The settings for the egret shot were 1/1000, f/10, and 800 ISO. This was taken from a boat. The next tour I'll be leading to Louisiana (and Texas) for swamp photography will be at the end of October next year.