Flock of starlings

These beautiful Kenyan birds are called superb starlings. I'd photographed them individually many times, but this was the first instance in which I was able to capture several at one time. This was a very tricky shot, though. I was using a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto, and my aperture was f/4.5. That meant depth of field was shallow, and in a picture like this all the birds needed to be in focus for it to be considered a successful image, at least by my standards. Most of the birds, surprisingly, were essentially on the same plane with one exception. The bird on the far right was a few inches further from the camera and therefore it was a bit soft. So, I used Topaz Sharpen AI and was able to rectify the problem. My other settings were 1/320 and 200 ISO.