Martial eagle taking flight

The shapes of wings are most attractive when birds take flight and when they land. They furiously ply the air with their wings to maneuver into the perfect position. In this case, the martial eagle was taking off in the Masai Mara of Kenya. I took this picture with a 500mm focal length lens, and this meant the sky was out of focus. When birds are relatively close to the camera position, long lens just don't have the depth of field to render the distant sky sharp. I didn’t want a soft background, so I replaced the sky with a sharp image of storm clouds using the Photoshop pulldown menu command, Edit < Sky Replacement. I think that adds a lot of drama to the image -- more so than a blurred backdrop. Completely blurred backgrounds have their place -- they direct all the attention on the subject -- but to me this situation called for something different. My camera settings were 1/3200, f/9, and 500 ISO.