Here is another shot of a sandhill crane image from Basque del Apache Wildlife refuge in New Mexico I put together. When photographing birds in flight, the background is almost never considered; instead, all the attention goes to just keeping the bird in focus. If you happen to get a good background, it's total luck. Sure, capturing a completely blurred background behind the bird looks good and is often easy to do. But to show a sense of environment, and especially where every detail I sharp, is nigh impossible with a single click of the shutter. Here, I carefully selected the bird using the pen tool, which is the most accurate selection method, and then I pasted the crane into the background. I then pasted the crane into the picture again, inverted it with Edit > transform > flip vertical, and moved it into place to make the reflection. I then added a very slight waviness to the reflected image using the plug-in, Flood. My settings for the image of the bird were 1/3200, f/8, and 2500 ISO.
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