These are Nanday parakeets I photographed in Brazil at the best bird park I’ve ever seen -- the one at Iguazu Falls. The background wasn’t very attractive, so I replaced it with a shot of out of focus foliage. Working around the feathers took some finesse, of course. I made a layer mask of the green foliage layer, lowered its opacity so I could see the birds through the green haze, and then used the brush tool (with the foreground/background color boxes black to white, respectively) to paint away the foliage on top of the birds and their perch. I then moved the opacity slider back to 100%. To retain the minute detail on the head of the middle bird, I selected that area in the original shot, pasted it in place in this image, and then used the blend mode ‘darken’ to eliminate the original light background. This left the spike-like black feathers. My settings were 1/320, f/6.3, and 1600, and I shot this with a 70-200mm lens.
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