Bateleur eagle

This striking African raptor is a bateleur eagle. This is the original sky, but with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto, it was impossible to render it as sharp as the bird. A completely blurred sky would be acceptable, but that doesn't make as dynamic a picture, in my opinion, as showing full detail in the clouds. Therefore, I took two shots -- one of the eagle and one of the sky. I then composited them together using the incredible new sky replacement feature in Photoshop. I shot this with my first professional digital camera -- the Canon 1Ds Mark II -- in 2008, and at that time noise was a much bigger problem than it is now. 3200 ISO was unusable, and 1600 ISO wasn't good but we had to live with it. That meant I tried to use the lowest ISO possible. In this case, it was 200. With the introduction of the new, high-end mirrorless cameras like the R5, we can shoot at an astonishing 10,000 ISO and hardly pay the price. That translates to the ability of shooting with faster shutter speeds, smaller lens apertures, and in lower light situations compared to the past. What a great time it is to be a photographer! My settings for the shot of the eagle were 1/800 and f/7.1.