Bateleur eagle

One of the more striking birds in Africa is the bateleur eagle. I've only seen them twice, but the red bill and feet make any pictures of them visually arresting. I took this perched eagle with a 500mm focal length, and as I've discussed in the past, the clouds would definitely be out of focus due to the shallow depth of field of such a long lens. Since I usually like as much definition in my images as possible, I took a second picture of the sky, and then I combined both sharp images into one composite. In this case, I used Photoshop not to create some kind of special effect; rather I used digital technology to overcome the limitations of optics and to bring the image back to what I saw. Remember, we never see shallow depth of field with our eyes. My settings were 1/800, f/7.1, and 200 ISO. I captured this in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.