I love how this picture turned out.
You might ask “How long did you have to wait to get just a single bird on the wing with all the others in the water or was it just luck”? Well, no, not all luck and I actually shot a bunch of pictures in a sequence to get the one I wanted. But I also used a little bit of photo trickery to get this final result. The original picture looked like this:
Notice the extra birds in flight in the picture. I wanted to edit out each of those birds and be left with just the one. At first I tried using an editing technique in which I paint over the extra image with replicated colors in the rest of the image, and this can usually result in satisfactory results. For instance I was able to use that in the following shot to remove the people and leave only the main objects.
However, in this case I knew I had taken several pictures in sequence and some of them may have clear images in the are where the other birds appear. So I checked out the other pictures and found this one in which the marked areas corresponded with the birds in the original photo and I should be able to copy and paste over each of the birds nearly seamlessly.
I use a program I first got for free when I worked for IBM called “IBM Perfect Photo”. It contains a photo editor program I have used many times to touch up, combine, and otherwise edit jpeg images. I had lost it a few years back after switching computers but I was able to find a copy for a nominal price on line and so now I have an official, paid-for version of the program. It is my go-to Photoshop.
