About the Image(s)

I started with a photo of a bird that my friend, Richard Goldenberg, DDG #72 (Nature) had taken. He took the photo from an airboat in FL using a Sony Alpha 1, Mark II with a Sony 600 mm prime. I decided to crop the photo of the bird focusing in on the eye. I had recently taken a photograph of a moonlit partially cloudy sky (Sony A7 IV, Tamron 28-200 mm lens, 1/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200) which I had initially thought I would use for the background of my composite. This photo however was not “speaking to me” as a background, so I decided to use it to fill the pupil of the eye instead - changing the scope of the composite from very large to very small. In Photoshop, I added stars to the sky photo and also de-noised in Topaz. To give the piece some drama - and to tell a story (Life is short, Such is life, etc) I decided to use the eagle from my previous month’s submission to the group and add it over the background of the sky. I used Topaz for some sharpening of the piece - everywhere except the eye - which gave an unexpected poster like effect to the image.
I had a lot of trouble cleaning up the reflections of trees in the eye in the original photo. I used AI to solve this, but it still left me with an unconvincing iris around a section of the pupil. I spent a whole lot of time on this - unfortunately I do not recall precisely what I did. The lesson that I learned from this step of the composition was if something seems ridiculously challenging, and is consuming way too much time - it’s better to start over with a different approach.